hi,
I’m not an artist, nor a supergeek, nor a IT guy.
I’m just curious.
I apologize if I’ll write some language mistakes here, I’m italian, and don’t perfectly know english.
anyway, I sometimes like play with blender, so I found out Sheep It render farm. Then I found out this thread, and the Amazon EC2 option, that I discovered being more simple than I thought.
I tried couple of times and verified this method.
I started an Instance with Ubuntu 12.04 server as OS (a Compute Optimized instance. I tried c3.xlarge and c1.xlarge)
I choose this OS because I’m quite familiar with it.
On the stock OS you need to install a Java Runtime Enviroment, and Blender, because the SheepiIt java-program downloads the render program (i.e. Blender) but doesn’t cover all the needed dependencies. I solved easily with a Blender installation, that provide all the needed dependencies.
the first time, without Blender installed i got: “error render have generated no output file” message. The same one rider_rebooted experienced and wrote about.
now, less talk, more stuff:
I put those 5 commands into a little and really basic script (the first one I ever made…). Launching it, it downloads, installs and finally starts the SheepIt render.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:irie/blender -y
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install blender openjdk-7-jre-headless
wget [www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/media/applet/farm-client-3.2.1594.jar](http://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/media/applet/farm-client-3.2.1594.jar)
java -cp farm-client-3.2.1594.jar com.renderfarm.worker.standalone.FermeDeRendu https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com USERNAME PASSWORD
some notes:
-the ‘farm-client-x.x.xx.jar’ may change in future, if they update it, it will need to be corrected (maybe the whole link, and also the “java…” command)
-must insert username and password in the last command that lauches the render
some final thoughts:
-I don’t know if this is the best way, I know it works fine and easy.
-having a ready OS image would be great, but running (i.e. copy paste and launch one by one =D) those 5 commands take no more than 2 minutes. Putting them into a personalized script helps a lot when you want to launch more than 3-4 instances…
-this is CPU rendering. Amazon provides GPU-CUDA instances, but I read somewhere some posts about driver configuration of these instances, and other stuff far beyond my basic linux knowledge and my will. (and those instances prices are much higher than the cpu ones I tried for testing yesterday)
-SheepIt renders first your own projects, so you can start 10, 20, n-thousands instances and speed up your own project render (here i think that credits don’t count). You can even keep private a project, and others account/people wont process it, so you don’t get your files going around the web, and into other people’s pc. (if you want keep it private)
