Help setting up a remote render farm for my projects!

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1

Hello everyone!

My name’s Jamie and I’ve been a blender artist now for the last five years and over the last year I’ve successfully broken into being a freelance blender artist.

I have a dilemma that I currently don’t have a solution for and I was wondering if anyone on here can help.

I’m setting off in two weeks to Europe and possibly many parts of the world traveling and doing my own blender work as well as client work to fund my lifestyle. I’m traveling with a high spec laptop and I also have a high spec desktop at home that I want to set up as a personal render farm for animation projects. I understand there are plugins that will enable me to do this, I’ve been trying out Crowdrender for the last few hours, but as far as I’m aware that needs the master computer to be connected to the network until the rendering is finished. This brings me to my two main keys as why this has been tricky to find an answer to.

  1. I want to set a project to render from my laptop sharing the .blend and all the packed information with the desktop back at home, turn the laptop off, and have that rendering while the laptop is powered off and in my bag. I can then come to it hours later and develop, send to client ect.
  2. I wont be connected to WiFi all the time so I want the render farm to still function as normal while using a hotspot from my phone to give my laptop internet to then upload, render and receive files as normal.

Unfortunately I am AWFUL when it comes to less computer surface knowledge stuff like this. I don’t know the first place to turn or the first thing to do!

Any and all help and/or pointers in the right direction would be greatly very greatly appreciated. It would be a nightmare traveling around - having to stop around a hotel / hostel room regularly just to twiddle my thumbs for 12 hours while it renders to then get it back, make changes, do the same thing again until the project is finished. I have a very capable PC sitting at home collecting dust.

Here’s some more information that might be useful:

Desktop specs: Windows 10 RTX 3070 similar tiered everything else

Laptop specs: Windows 10 RTX 3080ti mobile similar tiered everything else

Any ideas? Pre-emptive thank you!

2

Hello,

Here is a simple way :
You can use a software like TeamViewer to remotely access your Desktop PC from the laptop.
Once you run teamviewer on the deskop you’ll have a code that you can enter on the laptop.
Make sure to read the specs , like maybe the code can have a expiration time…

The second software you can look for is something similar to dropbox, so each computer get synchronized. You’ll automate file transfer of .blend and render between each computers.

Make sure to look for alternative of these softwares, both are well known but I personally don’t like much dropbox, I use seafile which is awesome, but I don’t recommend it to you because it’s complex to setup.

I suggest you to have someone who can go to your place in case of trouble, electricity shutdown, a render halting the computer etc… Working with computers remotely is always a bit tricky. And hard to troubleshoot.

That’s at least the simple solution, of course if you were geeky you can think of a more automated process, more like a true renderfarm where you submit a file and it renders. But you’ll have probably a lot of geek stuff to do before getting it running.

And if all that turns out bad, you can look for a real renderfam, (a service that uses their own computer to render) which is pricey but will get the job done.

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