A friend of mine and I are working on creating a distributed renderfarm. Basically, you are presented with a webpage. You upload your blender file, giving a start frame and end frame. The code does the rest, and at the end you’re presented with a video file to download your animation. You’re given a page to monitor the process of the render.
This is kind of hard to visualize, so I made a video and uploaded it to youtube:
At this time, there are only a few machines running in the farm, but when the second cluster comes up, we should have a lot more.
In any case, my 3d animation skills are nothing spectacular (I’m working on it though :p), and we are ready to open this up to a controlled group of people who are looking for an easier rendering solution (a closed beta, if you will). It doesn’t matter if you’re creating your first blender animation tonight, we’ll help you render your stuff for free!
You’ll get access to the development server, and basically have free reign to render animations at will. All we is ask for in return is feedback on what you like, what you don’t like, and what you’d like to see added. It’s a fairly simple system so far, but we hope to expand upon it.
For those of you who are wondering what our end goal is, we hope to have a publicly available render site in a few months, where people can upload their blender files and they will be rendered for free. We’re considering some sort of paid option as well where you can skip to the front of the queue or don’t have to wait for flood restrictions, but there will definitely be a free option.
If you’re interested, reply here or shoot me a PM. I’m doing my own animations now and visit these forums daily (first post!).