Hi guys,
I have a question about render farms…
I have tried Blenders Network render and got it to work, but I am not satisfied with the possibilities of it.
It seems that you can distribute a chunks of frames to a different computers and every one of them works only on the frames you gave them.
With this system you are only dividing total number of frames to many computers instead of doing everything on only one.
But…the thing I would like to know…
Can you somehow make a lot of computers work only on the one frame at the same time?
What if I am only rendering 1 frame?
At work I have 6 xeon E5-1650 (3,5 GHz) commputers that I can use, and maybe even 10 more that I could use if they allow me to.
I would like to make them into a small farm and make Blender cycles faster.
So…does anyone have an idea?
I have watched online, but didn’t find anything very usefull.
distributed rendering isnt currently possible in cycles. its on the roadmap, but dont expect it very soon.
afaik the only thing you could do is to animate the border rendering box and render these “frames” over the renderfarm and stich the results in compositing
If cycles can render tile by tile, then it can be rendered on a render farm, I would think. Or at least, I’ve did it with my render farm using BI as the render engine. Of course I wasn’t using blender’s net render, I was using a sort of home brew set up that used a 3rd party image processing software to stitch the tiles together…
You can try my custom blender build.
It includes a patch that enables tiled network rendering in cycles. The patch in question is small, it just enables existing but disabled code, so it may give a preview of what might be the future of cycles network rendering.
Download the cycles server binary on the render nodes and then enable network on user preferences on blender client, select network for rendering on render settings and render. It auto-detects the nodes and distributes rendering. Don’t mix windows with linux or macos, it crashes.
