how to build a (Blender) render farm

someone asked me if his ethereum mining rig would also be usable as a renderfarm.
well his hardware specs where kinda special…

But setting up a renderfarm, is kinda different then just installing Blender on a linux box.
I wonder if there are ready solutions, that have a form of a management pc, and pushing jobs to a large environment (100+ PC’s with 6 top level cuda cards), would get properly distributed. Apparently he’s a big player in this field (and i kinda doubt that it will be profitable to him), but he is considering maybe some charity time… he was still considering the pricing model for rgent jobs.

Anyway rendering is completely new to him, he’s amazed by what i make.
Now i wonder if there’s maybe some software around / scripts.
That can turn part of his enviroment in a render farm.
Only a few machines would allready be a dramatic difference as compared to my own render times.

You could try Flamenco: https://www.flamenco.io

Or, if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, you can just use GNU Parallel. If you fragment the work appropriately, it load-balances pretty well.

Flamenco is a really good option, I´ve installed and tested it and it works flawlessly :slight_smile:

We use Deadline and it works great. It’s the most widely used as far as I’ve seen. It can be used with just about any software. One nice thing about useing blender with deadline is that Blender doesn’t care if the machine is using CPU or GPU. If it’s running on a machine with a GPU, it uses it. If not, it just uses CPU. There’s no other renderer like that yet.

I hate deadline with a passion lol

maybe test crowd render. I did some tests and had some little conversation with james who did the plugin. have no time at the moment to test things. They try to make a plugin that provides cloud renderingfor their render farm and besides that, a free version for you all with local network and render farm that seems to be quite good and promising in my opinion. distributed rendering based on render borders and so on. Some things are still in progress like firewall problems, good distribution on different machine configurations, initialition and so on. But growdrender gave me some easy setup what I realy missed with all other solutions for blender.

edit
@ lord odin why do you hate deadline?

i did not test the latest flamenco but all that setup things with the blender cloud and so on i read about are a little deterrent at the moment. But maybe it is easy.

For a local renderfarm I find CGRU/Afanasy a very good application, it’s also very customizable once you dig into it and know a bit of python / scripting.
I’m not sure it will fit you needs tho …

Cheers !