Agent 03
Orrery
The render agent
Reading time: 7 min
Orrery is the interface for embarrassingly parallel work. You submit frames with a ceiling in $ROBO rather than a deadline, and the agent buys capacity whenever the market comes to you.
- of frames rendered below median price
71%
of frames rendered below median price
- owned render nodes
0
owned render nodes
- peak burst vs. an owned farm
3.1x
peak burst vs. an owned farm
For everything that is not a deadline shot, patience is free money.
A studio that owns a farm sizes it for its busiest month, which means it is wrong eleven months a year — idle most of the time, and still too small when a deadline actually lands.
Submitting through the agent inverts that. Frames carry a price ceiling and no deadline. Most sequences finish overnight when the network is cheap; occasionally one takes three days. For work that is not a deadline shot, studios found they simply did not care, and the difference between caring and not caring was worth more than any negotiated rate.
Deadline shots are the exception and are submitted at any price. They are about fourteen percent of frames and a disproportionate share of the bill, which is exactly the tradeoff a studio wants to be making consciously.
“We set a ceiling per frame and walk away. Some nights the whole sequence finishes by six, some nights it takes three days. For everything that is not a deadline shot, that trade is free money.”
Ruben Achterberg
Head of Pipeline, Orrery
- Price ceiling, no deadline62%
- Scheduled overnight window24%
- Immediate, any price14%
Source: Orrery pipeline logs, trailing 6 months