what you need to make a personal render farm
In our previous posts (What are the advantages of using a render farm), we made a detailed explanation of what a render farm is, and why you should make use of a render farm. The importance of a rendering farm cannot be overemphasized especially for those who are into design, architecture, animation, gaming as well freelancers who carry out minor 3D jobs.
Often, when people hear about a render farm, what mostly comes to the mind is the application of large and expensive servers that are using the latest technologies and probably chunks of money that has been invested into it. Well, this is true, especially for those who see it as a form of business, are short of time, or just want to make use of an updated render engine software.
On the other hand, there are those who are newly born into this industry, they have all the time in the world to render their projects, and are not ready to spend their money on render farms. So, in this post, we will walk you through all that is involved in building a personal render farm.
STEP 1: Render Farm Hardware Setup
First things first; you have to know how much you are willing to spend on a set up like a render farm. What will really guide you is the cost of CPU power and GPU power as well as the type of project you wish to render. You can also save cost, by networking one, two or three system together and making use of the overall power. For instance, if we network 4 systems with each having 4 cores, this gives us the ability to render with 16 cores. And this is the fundamental principle of how every render farm works.
You should also know that some render engines demand different power. For those who will want to make use of VRay, Mental Ray, Maxwell Render, Arnold render, Thea Render, KeyShot, Cycle, and Corona, you should try to increase the CPU rendering power because these render engines are based on the performance of your CPU. But if you desire to make use of purely GPU-based render engines like Octane Render, Arion Render, LuxRender, Muskito Render, Cycle GPU, Red Shift, you should try as much as possible to increase the GPU power.
In a previous post, we talked about the difference between CPU and GPU rendering. You might want to check that out.
STEP 2: Networking
The second phase is to connect each system to together. Unlike the time consumption experienced when rendering on a single system, a network setup will allow you to render projects simultaneously across several systems.
Recently, network rendering has been receiving much credence – thanks to the quality of rendered images, the demand for rendering an animation, as well as render engines and application software. All these advantages put together have furnished users with more power when used on a rendering network. Generically, the term network rendering is used when you render projects using a render farm.
STEP 3: Render Management
Now that your systems are connected together and ready to render, what you need to do next is to divide your animation frames into smaller segments (basically, into the number of systems you have connected) and render each segment with one system at a time. Usually, it becomes difficult to divide frames or gather output files after they must have rendered, to make things easy, you will need to make use of a render management software. A render management software will help you divide your rendering files as well as give you easy access to gather or collate your files after rendering.
Below is a list of render management software you can use on your personal rendering farm. In a future article, we will dive deeper into reviewing each software.
- Deadline
- RenderPal V2
- PipelineFX
- SquidNet
By utilizing any of these render managers on a private rendering farm, you will be able to efficiently coordinate your renderings as well as experience the pleasure of operating a personal render farm.
In conclusion, this post aims to let you understand how the rendering system works as well as explain to those who are just embracing the industry what it takes to raise a rendering farm especially for those who are working on projects that are not time-based.
As you may know, big projects such as animations or detailed designs projects require time. This is one of the most important criteria that forces people to make use of the services of a render farm because more time is needed to render an animation on a personal system than it is needed when using a render farm to render. Besides that, the techniques and hardware that are employed on a render farm are usually costly for an individual.
One more thing that makes render farms the go-to choice is the collaboration between rendering engines and render farms. Render engines have been releasing products that are tailored toward the requirements of a render farm. These conditions include time reduction and improvement in the render quality.
As such, Render Boost has incorporated full supports for render engines as well as all 3D software. So, we are ready to render all your files in one stretch.
