Setting up AWS

AWS is Amazon Web Service. It can be used to create rendering 3 to 8 times faster than on your own machine, (depending - of course - on the speed of your own machine). A rendering which would take 2 days on your own machine can be completed in 12 hours or less on an AWS Virtual machine for a cost less $45.00.

We hope to add functionality to make this easier to do in future versions of IRender nXt and nXtRender, but with a little effort you can do it right now. Once you set up your virtual machine, you can save it, restart it, and easily connect to it for future rendering.

You can also create multiple machines to process simultaneous renderings or different models or views.

This process is a little daunting the first time, but is much easier when you return to your AWS machine for future renderings.

Advantages

• You can start the rendering on your AWS machine, and not slow down your own machine at all while it is rendering.
• You can create renderings 5 to 10 times faster than on your own machine.

(Depending, of course, on he speed of your current machine)

Test Results

Sample Model

This is a sample model supplied with IRender nXt.

Rendering Speed

We rendered it using three of our machines

Machine	Processor	Cores	Logical Processors	Time to Render 100 Passes
PowerSpec Desktop	2.67GHz	4 Cores	4 Logical Processors	77.5 minutes
Lenovo W520 Portable	2.20GHz I7	4 Cores	8 Logical Processors	37 minutes
Lenovo W530 Portable	2.70GHz I7 Laptop	4 Cores	8 Logical Processors	25 minutes
AWS c3.4xlarge EC2 Cloud	2.79GHz Xeon Processor	1 Socket	16 Virtual Processors	14.3 minutes
AWS c3.8xlarge EC2 Cloud	2.79GHz Xeon Processor	2 Sockets	32 Virtual Processors	10.5 minutes

Final Rendering

Rendering from AWS on-demand machine

Setting up an AWS Machine

Make sure you have an Amazon Account

You need an account with Amazon.com in order to use their web service.

If you do not have one, you can create one as part of the sign up process.

Create a Virtual EC2 machine

You will select a machine type, and create a machine to use for your rendering.

Here is the pricing for their Compute Optimized machines - which is what you want.

Based on our benchmarks above, the C3.8xlarge machine will render about 1 1/2 times faster than the c3.4xlarge machine, but costs twice as much. So if cost is a key factor, you may want to choose the c3.4xlarge but if time is important than the C3.8xlarge machine is a good choice.

A typical overnight rendering (12 hours on the AWS machine) will cost $45.00 for 8xlarge or $22.50 for 4xlarge.

Activate your machine

A. Login to your EC2 Dashboard:

[1]

and click Instances

B. Start the Instance

Select you instance, click Actions, and click start

• Wait for the Instance State to change from pending to running

Connect to your Instance

Select the Instance again, and click Connect

You will get a dialog to download a Windows Remote Desktop File.

Click Get Password

You need to upload or paste your PEM Key Pair to get a password to use with the instance

After entering the key pair, click Decrypt Password to get the password.

Download the Remote Desktop File to connect to your instance

Step 4. - Login in with Remote Desktop

Step 5. - Disable IE Enhanced Security Configuration

IE is set by default in Windows Server 2012 to make it difficult to download viruses, etc. and mess up your server.

You will want to be able to access the web, download SketchUp, download IRender nXt, etc.

So we want to remove this setting.

1. Open Windows 2012 Server Manager (probably the first icon in your Windows Taskbar)
2. Select Local Server
3. Change IE Enhanced Security Configuration from on to off.

Step 6. - Install SketchUp

Step 7. - Install IRender nXt

If you want to use IRender nXt inside of SketchUp, after the 30day trial on your AWS machine, you will to purchase or use an additional license for it. However, you can use the IRenderBatch exe, which is installed along with IRender nXt to render models which were created and exported on your main computer.

You can download the latest version of IRender nXt from: Download IRender

Step 8. - Get your rendering ready on your local machine

Other Considerations

Setting an Alarm to shut off the machine

One you start your AWS machine, you will be charged until you stop it.

You can set an alarm to shut it down automatically after the rendering is complete.

(Of course, this makes the most sense if you use Auto Image to save you final renderer image and also use AutoSave to save an image every 10, 50 or whatever passes, to make sure that your final image is not lost after the rendering.)