[ale] Blender Render Farm for amateurs.

[Jason van Gumster]

Chris Fowler <cfowler at outpostsentinel.com> wrote:

> I made a huge mistake today and installed Blender. Someone posted a picture
> to FB labeled "How many girls in this picture? I don't have wall size mirrors
> so I installed Blender and recreated the scene. I'm now playing with it. My
> last foray into this was with 3D Studio and others back in 94. 
> 
> My conclusion that CPUs are so fast now that render times have dropped is
> wrong. The scenes have just scaled with resources. I used to start a render,
> go to work, and come home to see a beautiful 640x480 picture. 1920x1080 today
> is going to be just as painful. 
> 
> "Surely there is a service that does this for me" came to my head and sure
> enough, I found many links for render farms. 
> 
> Are there any that are cost effective for someone just goofing off? 

Welcome to the world of Blender!

When it comes to farming out your renders, I'd say you have three primary
options:

  * Sheep It (https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com) - this is a distributed farm,
    kind of like SETI at home for rendering. I have some friends who speak very
    highly of it.

  * Renderbot (http://renderbot.net) - You build your own renderfarm on the fly
    using EC2 instances on AWS. I've considered this a couple of times, but
    never quite pulled the trigger on it.

  * RenderStreet (https://render.st) - Render Street isn't free, but it's very
    affordable. They even give you a free trial run to start with (so if you
    just have a few things you need to render, it's essentially free). Their
    service is great and they're really the first place I turn to when I'm
    rendering on a deadline.

You can also get really far by optimizing your render options (this is true
whether you're rendering with Cycles or the older 'Blender Internal' renderer).
Feel free to ping me if you have any questions regarding Blender. I'm happy to
spend time talking about it.

  -Jason