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Blender Tutorial – Create A Render Farm of Any Size (Easy + FREE)

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I had access to 5 top spec mac pro editing computers, and decided to combine them all together to render my previous tutorial’s bonus clips. Have you ever combined computers together to make a render farm? How did you do it? Do you make your own render farm by combining computers like this, or do you prefer things like Sheep It, or professional paid renderfarms?

This technique will work for any render engine within Blender, so it doesn’t matter if you’re using cycles, blender internal, luxrender or anything else. The main thing to bear in mind is that this is intended for speeding up animation rendering, and not still images. There are ways to do that, but they’re not covered in this tutorial.

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43 responses to “Blender Tutorial – Create A Render Farm of Any Size (Easy + FREE)”

  8. Another more simpler way would be to just let computer 1 to render from frame 1 – 100 and computer 2 to render from frame 101-200 and so on or maybe play little bit with the frame skip settings.

  10. Great tutorial for animation rendering.
    I'd liked to seen a video on using multiple computers rending a single frame together with blender. Such as a cloud based system or beowulf style systems.

  11. A lot of people don't know this… but on a Mac, if you just drag a file or folder onto your terminal window, it will automatically paste in the path of the item and fix any spaces in the path with back slashes.

  14. If I have a computer with 8 cores and 128gb of ram could I in essence do the something or would I have to have multiple computers that are configured exactly the same in order to do this? I have two different computers with intel core 2 duos doing nothing. Could I use them in this manner?

  20. So I know that this video is a tad old, but you actually don't necessarily need to add the backslashes into *nix based paths (like Macs or *nix). You can encapsulate the spaces within a pair of quotation marks ("") so that if you have a folder like //path to network/, you can paste the path as "path to network"/ and the spaces can be inclulded rather than having to add in all of those backslashes wherever there is a space.

    A note about using both CPU and GPU rendering at the same time though:
    In general, if you have m GPUs and n CPU cores (physical cores, not threads), you'll want to use (n-m) cores for the CPU rendering leaving m CPU cores free for the GPU render.

    The basis for this is that the GPU still needs the CPU to feed it the data (and read the data back when it has completed), and to do so, it needs a CPU to do that. So if you have two GPUs and a 6-core CPU, and you want to use both GPUs at the same time for a render, you'll want to only use 4 cores for the CPU render, leaving 2 CPU cores free for the dual GPU render. It is also generally not recommended that you oversubscribe m CPU cores (i.e. if you have dual GPUs, you try and cram all of the GPU I/O only onto a single, remaining CPU core) because you can end up with the memory bottleneck (to the GPU) as the best case, and the worst case is that the conflict in memory I/O will actually cause BOTH GPU renders to crash due to oversubscribing resources. (Been there, done THAT before), so you'll want to avoid that.

    Since it would be difficult to detect problematic outputs, what typically happens is that you would have to throw away the entire render and start from scratch all over again, but WITHOUT the oversubscription of resources, so it's just easier and better to NOT do that when you start.

  21. I could really use some help… I save the file into a shared google drive folder, but when I "open" it, it actually downloads it first. Then that relative path is to my personal computers downloads folder, not a shared google drive folder. Therefore, the other computers have no way of seeing what frames each of them are working on because they create their own folders. Any ideas how to get the blend file to render an image directly to google drive folder???

  28. Great stuff, thanks! This is a good method for animation renderings, but unfortunately not for single frames rendering across multiple nodes. The Cycles Network Render add-on allows this though (along other time saving features). Definitely worth a try, if you're working on very large / complex still renders.

  30. Does this tutorial apply if you have server rack? For example, a HP c7000. Or does this tutorial only apply to laptops. I'm not really a technical wiz, so hopefully my question makes sense. Thanks!

  43. Awesome, I'm making an intensive animation scene in Blender and have access to 4-5 high end AMD rigs other than my own. I was going to give them all a set of frames to render on their own (for example each could have their own set of 100 frames) but this method looks much easier and less time consuming.

    Great!

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