I mean a place where you could basically just send your .blend to be rendered, and then just download the end result?
Something like “Folding at Home”, but for animation.
Also, about the PS3 - can blender scale automatically to use all six spu’s, or is there some hack one would have to apply in order to make the whole thing work right?
Either way, at $399 a PS3 would make a superb render box (It would also make a superb desktop pc generally - but only if we additionally had access to the RSX).
There is such a place. http://burp.boinc.dk
I’ve tried it. It saved me a month’s render on my 500 mhz PIII. The session took only 9 hours. Great for complex scenes with all the eye candy features turned on and resolution turn up. After the session you get a bunch of PNG files to download with Java client CATS.
At the moment sessions are scarce few blend files are being uploaded to be rendered.
has someone benchmarked the PS3 rendering yet?
BURP is an interesting option, but when I tried it it was still too early to use, and I haven’t tested it since. Definitely check that out first, it would be free and potentially much better than any single dedicated computer. If you need more reliability and you’re rendering for animation, then check out www.respower.com. They have a $20/month deal for Blender, with unlimited rendering. Unlimited in the sense that you can use it as much as you want, but there is a 15 minute per frame time limit, so it’s not appropriate for ultra high-quality still frame rendering. For more like $60 a month you can bump that up to an hour per frame. Each single machine is probably faster than whatever you’d have in mind for home use, too, so that time buys you a fair amount of rendering.
Basically, if you’re rendering animations, I doubt it’s worth your time or money to try to do it at home. If you’re one of those people who lets Indigo churn away on a picture for a week though, that’s a different story.