Hey everyone! I’ve been working more with Blender lately and curious about how you all handle rendering — especially for heavier projects.
Do you prefer rendering on your own machine, or do you use a render farm when it gets demanding?
Also, if you’ve tried services like Drop & Render or others, what was the experience like — pricing, speed, ease?
Would love to hear how you manage your workflow. Might help others (and me) figure out what works best!
Hello Sunil,
I have had som limited experience with Blender. For static shots local RTX is fine. When rendering large renders for print over 20-50000 px renders tiled rendering is the way to go.
For animations below 1080p I rendered with Eevee in the past but found 10 seconds per frame to slow.
Render Street render farm CPU based was affordable but slow as well. Downloading gigabytes of png/exr sequence over the internet was slow for me over fast internet only to find out that I have some rendering mistake.
For that reason I render in Unreal, locally and enjoy fast speeds. Even though Cycles path tracing looks better than Lumen. I render over 4K sizes animations so Unreal helps. And post process in Fusion to pimp up the look. I render EXR DWAA with Aces config.
For static shots Octane is also great and has superior look. But for animation it is taxing on the system. So RNDR network for that.
There is Redshift and Renderman but don’t have experience with those.
It is large topic on its own. So make your own research for your specific use case.
Every render engine has different instancing options for large scenes to optimise heavy data. Some offer out of core for GPU rendering to offload the data to RAM.
I have found that, unless it is a short project and you have a client willing to pay for a faster turnaround, paid render farms are just too expensive.
Your money is better spent setting up your own fast machine, or machines to render.
We have also trired a few local farm apps and not settled on anything we like. There is an app we use - I don’t know the name - but it helps with batch rendering different scenes while we are away from the facility.
We usually render to a drive on the netwrok that all computers have access to. I think we have about 8-9 machines with enough specs that we can turn on and render overnight.
So from there it is a bit tedeous to go around and get all the machines running, but once you do, Blender can put down placeholders for frames in progress and skip finished and placeholder frames and render the next available frame on the single render drive. So there is no reason to automate it more than that.
Its not perfect. And there might be a good app around to use to automate parts of this, so I am open to suggestions.
But like I said, sometimes you know scenes will finish and you need to set up batch rendering when renders complete to go to the next scene. I have a tech guy that handles all of that.
Hello and welcome here !
In fact it all goes down to how your project is structured and it’s specifics…
Problem with projects similar to a short film, where you have a lot of shots and linked libraries is that it’s impossible to transfer the whole project to the farm. There are solution for that to extract only the needed file for the project, but as Richard pointed out, anyway it’s expensive. Since you have many shots, that requires many iteration to get right, file transfer can also become a waist of time.
If you are a small team working together, I prefer much more to use a local renderfarm with all the team PC’s. You let stuff render overnight and get all the shots in the morning. Even better, you can even have your PC render with a low priority and work at the same time, at least on linux.
I used CGRU / Afanasy for the local renderfarm and despite the fact that the UI is a bit visually lacking, after a while it’s very easy to use.
If you know some python you can even tweak the submitter so it’s just one click to send the shot to the farm.
If you are a team working remotely, or an individual, you might just think the project to use Eevee and render overnight. You need to find a good ratio so say during the day you work on 5/10 shots, you can have some really fast preview during the day, and you can render the final during the night.
That’s basically how I would do for a short film / series project.
Now say your project is more a product visualization, arch-viz , commercial… Where you have few shots that requires long renders then using an external renderfarm can make sense…
And that’s about it, feel free to ask if you have more questions !