DIY Renderfarm Building Tutorial for Distributed Blender Rendering

Accelerate your renders with a Render Farm!

A render farm is simply a collection of networked computers that work together to render a sequence in less time. By dividing your sequence between multiple machines your total render time becomes a fraction of what it is on a single computer. Most production studios will fill huge rooms with server rack upon server rack, full of thousands of rendering computers (or render nodes as you’ll hear them called). But they’re also useful (as well as financially viable) for smaller teams or even individuals. A render farm can be a custom built cluster for a few thousand dollars or it can be a collection of arbitrary computers, a computer lab with networked stations, or you can invite all your friends over with their laptops. The only requirement is that all the machines are functional with the basic requirements for running Blender. They can be operating with Linux (21:05 in the video), Mac OSX (12:22), Windows (14:22), or a mixture of each.

Blender makes it easy to take advantage of network rendering. The main thing I want you to take away from this tutorial is that this level of productivity can be harnessed by everyone regardless of budget.

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I will be walking you through 3 stages. The first stage is the process I went through for building my own custom farm unit. This may not fit in every Blender user’s budget but at the very least I hope it sheds some light on the possibilities and potential of building a customized farm. The second stage covers the networking process of connecting all the machines on a local network and controlling all render nodes from a master machine with VNC. This stage is required for network rendering whether you’ve built your own unit or you’ve linked arbitrary machines. The same process is explained for OSX, Windows, and Linux Fedora. In the third stage I’ll show you how to take advantage of Blender’s included addon “Network Render”. It allows us to easily launch and dispatch render jobs as well as provides us with utility to manage and monitor jobs.

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