Render farm setup

Learn how to create your own render farm with this tutorial from Blender Cookie. Kent Trammell writes: Interested in accelerating your renders? Link Setting Up a Render Farm. Robert 11 on June 25, AM. English Original X. View Original X.

By: Support. Support 0 contributions. Issue: How to set up a basic render farm using Backburner for 3ds Max and Maya. The costs to run a render farm are very high. The hardware of the render nodes must always be up to date. The software has to be licensed and the render farm needs a complex infrastructure, maintenance and a lot of power.

That's why there are commercial render farms, that users can rent and only pay a small percentage of all these costs, avoiding high costs, while still profiting from really fast renderings.

Image of a commercial render farm. There are two types of render farms: self-built and cloud based render farms commercial render farm. If an artist has several computers at his studio, he can use them to complete the rendering.

In this case, we're talking about a self-built render farm. Larger studios may use hundreds of self-deployed servers to render a project. However, this requires a high level of technical skills for the setup and maintenance. Further costs arise for the hardware and software, manpower and energy. The user can start rendering right away, doesn't need high technical skills and thus will save money.

Lastly, the greatest advantage is the speed of the rendering process, as well as, having the own computer available, while the project is rendered online.

Once registered with the provider, there is usually a software that you can download. This software integrates into your 3D software, which makes the usage very easy. When the scenes are checked, they are uploaded to the render farm. On the farm, the scenes are distributed to various render nodes that calculate the frames.

Once a frame has been calculated, it is automatically downloaded to the user's system. Some render farms, like RebusFarm, offer their users a ControlCenter, where they can check the progress online or in the render farm software. Each computer at any given time is working on a frame concurrently. Can you see the benefit now? Not only that, you can picture render on the farm and still be free to move onto another project on your creation computer.

No more being forced to render overnight. Do your best to avoid mixing kernels. The Mac kernel handles random numbers differently than a Windows kernel.

On things like noise or procedural textures — anything that uses a random seed parameter — you could end up with a flicker effect because the PC frames will look slightly different from the frames rendered on a Mac.

Most software, After Effects included, does not require a full install to become a render node. After Effects only requires the render engine to be installed. This means that one After Effects license can be used across an entire farm. However — and this is a big however — you do need to license and install any plug-ins on each render node along with any fonts that are associated with the projects you intend to render.

Some plug-ins do come with a render node license, some do not. As we said before, you can use idle computers around your network or old computers sitting in a storage closet. Think of it like a swarm of fire ants. You can always pick up used servers from sites such as Server Monkey. Now all the computers are using the same physical drives associated with the same drive letters. If you do have a SAN, just make sure all drive letters or mount names are the same for each drive on each render node.

Slow networks can cause slow renders. This is another advantage of using an old server. They all work together to give the servers four gigabits of network bandwidth.

You should also have a way of monitoring your render nodes without getting up from your main computer.