Tutorial: Create a Render Farm of Any Size
Moby Motion got access to a set of Mac Pros and decided to turn them into a render farm. Here’s how he did it.
I recently had access to the whole editing suite at The YouTube Space London, which included 5 top spec Mac Pros. The Mac Pro lineup hasn’t been updated in many years and subsequently it is easy to build a windows computer with orders of magnitude more render power, especially in the GPU department. Still, I couldn’t resist the chance to play around with CPU rendering on 60 CPU cores simultaneously – that totals 120 rendering threads, all at once. This tutorial shows you how to set up an animation render farm of any size, as well as rendering on your GPU and CPU at the same time.
If I have access to this setup again, I’ll be running some benchmarks (compared with my home rendering rig) which I’ll post on my blog here.
sheepit-renderfarm.com
Interesting stuff. I was just beginning to look into creating a renderfarm-type setup with an old pc I still have. Great information, Thank you!
Thea Render can actually use the Raspberry Pie computers and use the GPU build in.
A single unite has not much power but they are cheap to buy and then the GPU performance quickly adds up.
Would be amazing if Cycles could run on the Pie computers.
Some years back I started for long renderings to use online render farms and that sofar was it for me eliminating the need of a super rig at home
Mm. I work on a $3000 mac pro at office, intel xeon 4 cores @ 3.9 Ghz, 32gb ram, Dual AMD FirePro D300 @ 2 teraflops, and for blender rendering, my own $1000 gamer pc with its gtx970 is x5 faster in pratically all circonstances… :-/
I’m in a similar situation myself – and this tutorial wasn’t intended as a promotion for Mac Pro systems at all. But I see my setup in this video as being useful for CPU rendering. For example, some features still aren’t 100% supported in GPU, and some complex scenes might use too much RAM for most GPUs. In that case, the 64GB RAM in these computers might come in handy ;)
Mac Pros make use of AMD graphics cards. Cycles still isn’t up to scratch with OpenCL. Obviously you’re going to get better performance using nVidia cards. i.e. It’s not the fault of the Mac Pro, it’s just the hardware isn’t supported 100% by Blender yet…
For being used as rendering yeah they are out dated.
However I run my design work on a 2008 MacPro and render large images online as customers pay for it.
Win10 is still not there yet were macOS Sierra is – I run also win10 on the Mac as well as my MS Surface equipment.
Wouldn’t it be simpler to just use the built in Network Renderer in Blender. It ships with it by default, you just need to enable the Addon. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOjQET1hAEQ for how to.
Ahhh the joys of having money to burn.
That’s right! xD
I don’t get it, why would you render your files with the cpu when the gpu renders faster ?