I’m currently working on a project called BlenderCloud:
BlenderCloud is a platform for distributed processing of Blender 3D rendering jobs. It uses DrQueue for renderfarm management and the AWS virtualization environment to provide almost any number of virtual machines.
It can be an ideal solution for Blender artists who don’t have own rendering hardware available and don’t want to render on their modelling machines. Even if there is some dedicated rendering hardware, it might be important to have access to more computing power when deadlines have to be met.
Please contact me if you have some stuff to render and would like to test the system. Feedback is needed…
Seems like a good idea. I wonder if someone could set up a similar system that does this:
You can send off a blender file, but as payment you have to allow the server access to your machine when it is on, and thus find out it’s current state of activity. Then if you don’t do anything on your machine for 10 minutes it sends a blender file to your machine and then gets it to render a frame and upload it. It checks whether the machine is being used. Renders another frame. etc. When your machine starts getting used again it stops requesting frames.
Then the system, instead of earning you money, gives the developer access to a virtually unlimited amount of computing power. For their own projects, or to use commercially.
Sorry, that probably isn’t what you started your thread for though.
What you propose could be done with a central server where everybody connects and DrQueue for renderfarm communication. I think it would be problematic for commercial use because putting your project data on machines of diffenrent kinds of users doesn’t sound safe to me. Encryption of data storage and data transfer is required. Another thing is that each participant could have a different Blender version and operating system, which could also lead to side effects. Having a homogenous renderfarm makes things easier.
If you are interested in having a look on the system, just contact me.
Yeah, I hadn’t thought through it very far.
I had a look on your web-page and really like the system. Unfortunatly I don’t have anything that needs rendering (or lots of processing power) at the moment. I might contact you if I ever have a project that needs more voom than this computer can give me.