Render Farming

Rendering in Blender can take a long time, depending on resolution and complexity. With the rise in popularity of homebrewed and small studio 3d art, there are countless Internet-based render services available, and depending on your requirements, that might make sense for you. As always, it makes sense to support services that support open source, and one of the best supporters of open source rendering is Render Street, with Blender Cycles, LuxRender, and Yafaray services available. They are sponsors of Blender, and also help fund various open movie projects.

Render Street operates on a sliding scale, so pricing is relative to your needs.

There is an entirely no-cost option at https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/, although in order to “pay” for your renders, you must also contribute computer time to other people's renders.

You do not have to submit your renders to the Internet just to speed up your export. Building your own render farm is easy as long as you have a few computers to spare.

http://blender.formworks.co.nz/farmerjoe/README.html

http://cgru.info

Dirt simple renderfarm. no scripts needed.

Hey, recently I added some small features for peach that have an impact on small home renderfarms.

Auto-Threads, This option is in the output panel and is enabled by default. It makes the threads setting use the number of cores/cpu's your system has. This is nice if your rendering with various systems, some multicore.

On the command line give the argument -t 0

Buttons in the output panel -

• “No Overwrite” - never overwrites existing image files
• “Touch” - Create an image file before rendering.

With these options, you can point each blender instance to the same network filesystem, and hit render and render on each. and they will all render frames until there is none left.

You cant be 100% sure 2 PC's wont render the same frame, however the likelyhood is low enough in a fast network, its not really worth worrying about too much, though we can use semaphore locks at some point.

Thought users might like to know this since its really a no brainier to setup.

So you could render from the commandline like this…

blender /network/drive/foo.blend -o /network/drive/out -t 0 -a

Be sure to have -f # or -a last since rendering will run and evaluate the other args later.