3ds Max Cloud Workstation — GPU rendering by the hour

What we'd recommend for 3ds Max depends on what you render with. It's worth getting this right, because the wrong assumption costs you money.

V-Ray GPU and Chaos Vantage do their work on the graphics card. Those are the cases a rented workstation-class GPU is built for: VRAM is the ceiling on how much scene fits, and every Coreframe GPU has far more than the 6 to 8 GB in most laptops and entry desktops sold for design work. When a GPU render fails or forces you to cut texture resolution, VRAM is almost always why.

Corona is a CPU renderer. So is V-Ray's CPU engine, which many studios still use for final frames. A Coreframe node has a high-performance desktop CPU (the vCPU count is on the pricing page). That's a sensible CPU for driving a viewport and a GPU renderer, but it isn't a render node for CPU work. If your final frames come out of Corona, a rented workstation won't change that, and we'd rather tell you here than have you find out in your first session.

Most studios are somewhere in between. They model and light interactively on the GPU in Vantage or V-Ray GPU and keep CPU final frames wherever they already run. That works well, and it's easier if you plan for it from the start.

Archviz work in 3ds Max comes in bursts, which makes buying hardware a poor deal. There is a week before a client presentation when the machine cannot keep up, and three weeks afterwards when it idles. A workstation that renders comfortably lands at roughly $6,000, is bought once, and is still on the books whether or not the project that justified it goes ahead.

The second reason is that rendering takes the machine away from you. A local render ties up the computer you also model on, so the afternoon is spent waiting. Run it on a rented machine and you get the afternoon back, because your own computer stays free while the render runs somewhere else.

The third is hiring. A studio taking on a remote 3ds Max artist otherwise has to ship them a workstation, buy a laptop that cannot really cope, or hope they own something adequate. A rented machine they reach from their own laptop is a monthly line item instead of $6,000 of hardware, and it stops cleanly if the arrangement does not.

You get a full Windows 11 desktop. You install 3ds Max and your renderer with your own Autodesk and Chaos accounts, open your scene from persistent storage and get on with it. The viewport, material editor and render setup all work the same as on a machine under your desk.

The machine resets to a clean image when the session ends. That's how we can promise nothing from another studio's work is on it when you get it. Your scene files don't live on that machine. They sit on storage that persists between sessions, so a session you open on Friday picks up where Monday's stopped, with nothing copied around. On a committed monthly plan we build your applications into the baseline image on your nodes, so they are already there when you sign in.

Billing runs per minute from when you connect. Preparing the machine and uploads are free. If you don't connect within 10 minutes of your workstation being ready, it shuts down and those 10 minutes are charged; if a connection fails on our side, nothing is charged.

Yes. You get a full Windows desktop with an RTX GPU, and 3ds Max, V-Ray, Corona and Chaos Vantage all run normally. Autodesk and Chaos both need your own account to download, so we set these up with you once and they are on every workstation afterwards, running on your own licences.

No. A render farm takes a submitted job and sends back frames. Coreframe gives you an interactive workstation you drive yourself, so you can set up the scene, tweak materials and render in the same session, just as you would locally.

Every session starts from an identical clean machine, so anything you install during a session is removed when it ends. Your project files live on NAS storage, which persists between sessions. That reset is how we make sure nothing from another customer's work, or yours, is left on the machine. It matters when a project is under NDA.

Probably not, and it's better to know that now. Corona is a CPU renderer, and a Coreframe node has a high-performance desktop CPU, not a render-node CPU. That's enough to drive the application and a GPU renderer, but it isn't a CPU render node, so if your final frames come out of Corona the machine won't change that. It helps with V-Ray GPU and Chaos Vantage, which render on the graphics card.

VRAM sets a limit on what fits. Geometry, textures and lightmaps all have to fit on the card, and when they don't, a GPU render fails or you have to cut texture resolution. Every Coreframe GPU has far more than the 6 to 8 GB in many laptops and entry desktops sold for design work. We can't predict how your particular scene will behave, so open it in a session and watch the VRAM meter.

On ad-hoc hourly sessions, yes, because the machine resets to a clean image each time and the setup time is billed like any other minute. On a committed monthly plan we build your applications into the baseline image on your nodes, so they are there when you sign in. If you tell us what you use before your first session, we install it beforehand so your first hours test your real workflow instead of paying for setup.

Ad-hoc sessions are $1.49 per GPU-hour, billed per minute from when you connect, not per whole hour. Preparing the workstation and uploads are free. If you don't connect within 10 minutes of your workstation being ready, it shuts down and those 10 minutes are charged. If a connection fails on our side, nothing is charged. Committed monthly plans start at $70.99/month and bill extra hours below the ad-hoc rate at every tier: $1.99/hr on Small Team, $0.99/hr on Medium Team. Prices in US dollars carry no GST (export of services), and the invoice is in US dollars.

Yes. Your first top-up of $20 (no GST) buys 8 hours on an RTX 5080 (or about 18 hours on the RTX A4000, 12 on the RTX A5000), to use within 30 days, one per customer. You sign up with an email and a WhatsApp code to your mobile, with no ID documents, and international cards work. We won't say what you can finish in that time, because it depends entirely on your scene.