Can it be done?
Is it easy?
How do I do it?
(I have six workstations - I want them all rendering at once)
TS
The simplest way is to place your BLEND file on the network.
Then go to each machine and open up the BLEND file.
Make each machine render only part of the animation range for your animation.
For a single image, I would be curious to know if Cycles can do distributed rendering. I have not seen it mentioned, however.
Good point - Why didn’t I think of that?
I was about to go crazy - I have 5000 frames to do…
Was looking around at blender’s built-in net renderer the other day and it allows you to choose what render engine you want to use. I admit I have never used it before, so I can’t say how good it will work…
Randy
I can’t wait for Cycles to do distributed rendering of stills. Only way I’ve been able to do this so far has been to do several images with different seeds and composite them together. They all need a fairly high amount of passes though since its not a 1+1 kind of situation.
You can “fake” distributed rendering as well for a single frame: render on 10 machines 100 passes with a different seed, composite the render to make them each “add” up, and you’ll have something pretty close to a 1000 pass render 
To save VRAM splitting a Cycles (GPU) rendering into many tiles could be very useful.
In one of my testscenes I discovered that when I render only one half of a rendering (render region) then it uses about 90% less VRAM.
The Seed-Rendering-Trick uses always the same amount of VRAM which means it doesn’t save VRAM.
If I could dividide a rendering into alot of tiles (each tile rendered separatly) then it would solve the most of my VRAM-Limit problems I guess.
For me it would be very useful to have a plugin that can do distributed rendering (every workstation (CPU and GPU) in a network renders a tile and the plugin puts all tiles together after rendering) ?
This would be great for renderfarms and as I mention already for the VRAM-Limit issue.
Kind regards
Alain
You can check Placeholders, and uncheck overwrite in render/output tab, then just open the blend in a network folder and render from any computer the same file.
When finished, just list the rendered files by size to see for corrupted file, delete them, and rerender.
greetings …
I have a big question:
I used the client, the master and six slaves but to click on (open master monitor)
shows a single slave working
for example
http://www.pasteall.org/pic/36581
sorry for my English
@Warcos
Have no idea actually, but I get that if other slaves crash. They don’t automatically reconnect to master, so they drop out of further rendering. But guess you have another problem.
The Autor of “Oscurart Tools 3.0” told me that Afanasy (Open Source) works perfect:
“…We are using for distribute render Afanasy render farm (work with Oscurart Tools perfectly). You only need make a render batch (with Oscurart Tools) and send job to the farm…”
Kind regards
Alain
@Warcos i think the network render is only for more than one frame like in an animation it will assign each slave a frame but im not sure i have only used it once and that was long ago