Render farms sound like a complicated thing to do, so if building your own render farm seems like an expensive or cumbersome task, how long does it really take to build? Or how much effort should we put into it? So let’s take a look.

I used to think that rendering farms were so expensive that only big companies like Pixar, Disney or the big VFX studios could afford them.

However, if all it takes is another PC with a bit of expertise in addition to a workstation in terms of hardware, we can build our own little rendering farm.

Since this guide is quite lengthy, I hope you have the patience to read all of it. Before we start building our render farm work, let’s take a look at some general questions:

What is a render farm?

Render farm is a collective term for a cluster of computers connected through a network connection. They are commonly used in industries that process animated movies, CG commercials, VFX shots or still images, and render Farms will use those production files to generate computer images.

Each individual computer in such a rendering farm cluster is usually referred to as a RenderNode.

According to a Wikipedia entry, The term “Render Farm” comes from The processing of frames for a short animated film called “The Boored Room” that was animated using software formerly known as Autodesk 3D Studio.

Autodesk technicians are said to have done this by placing a bunch of computers in a room, and the “working frame” was later incorporated into the render farm. When the term was coined (in 1990), those computers were still individually assigned tasks and not networked over a network.

Who needs to use render farm?

If you are a VFX visual effects studio, or an animation company, or a freelancer, and then work in an office or from home, you may need to use render Farms.

Render Farms main function is to uninstall, split and accelerate rendering task, the tasks that need to be production staff from the work of PC or workstation for the hard work, now workers in the platform of Render farm work, released his original work PC, allowing them to carry on the work of other projects.

Of course, not all work needs to be on a render farm, and to get the most out of a render farm, you just need to upload work that takes time. Otherwise, work that takes days or weeks to complete can be broken up into smaller tasks that can be distributed to multiple PCS for rendering.

Here are some missions that use render farms:

  • Render 3D animated image sequence type work:

From Maya, 3DSMax, Cinema 4D, Blender, Houdini, Lightwave, Keyshot, AutoCAD or internal third party rendering engines (e.g. Octane, Redshift, V-ray, Mental-Ray, Corona, Cycles… You can make your own Settings, layers, or names.

  • Render image sequences or animations from 2D/compositing software such as After Effects, Nuke, Fusion, Mocha, etc

  • Processing tasks such as noise reduction in Altus or Vray, conversion/rendering tasks from Media Encoder, DJV, FFMPEG, RVIO and Quicktime, VRIMG2EXR, etc

  • Simulation tasks from software such as RealFlow or Naiad

  • The command line task/script you choose can be split into smaller tasks in parallel

If any of these tasks take a lot of time to complete on a PC, you can benefit from using render farms.

Assuming that you earn money from your own work, your work depends on customer feedback and a fast production cycle. If we can help customers finish their work faster, we can get funding faster and carry out other projects faster.

If you are working on a personal project, have no deadlines, and can use your own computer to render the project if you want, then a render farm may not be necessary.

After all, using render farms is not cheap and will only pay for itself if you get a return on investment first.

In this paper, author of how to set up their own rendering farm (ultimate guide) (1) content by * * * * Renderbus cloud rendering farm release, if you want to reprint, please indicate the source and the link: www.renderbus.com/share/Rende…

For more information on rendering farms, see Renderbus Cloud Rendering Farms at www.renderbus.com/

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