Advertisement

You're blocking ads, which pay for BlenderNation. Read about other ways to support us.

Farmer Joe reopens his render farm! After nearly 15 years!

6

larryboy writes:

Farmerjoe was a popular, open-source, Blender render farm software written for Blender 3D versions 2.4x in 2006 by Mitch Hughes. It stopped working in Blender 2.5x and beyond because Blender changed, the Blender python API changed and because Python itself changed.

This new version for Blender 2.8x was born out of frustration that there weren't any simple, small-scale render farm solutions available and also my memory of how good Farmerjoe was when I used it for my master's films in 2010/11. With help from Mitch I have got it going again, fixed some bugs, added some features and written a Blender add-on which submits jobs through the Blender interface.

Features include:

  • Rendering frames (any image format blender supports)
  • Using project subdirectories for textures or baked information etc.
  • Rendering the resulting frames to an AVI JPEG, AVI RAW or FFMPEG file.
  • Rendering a single large image by splitting it into parts, rendering on separate computers and recombining them.
  • Specifying a directory in the root of the Farmerjoe share where AVIs or composite images will be rendered. Different people can have different directories.

You can use it on a single computer to queue jobs overnight or on a multicomputer system.

The software is available on Github and I have started a thread on BlenderArtists.

Hope people find it useful :)

(More images available in the Github 'ForReadme' folder)

Thanks Laurence

About the Author

Laurence Weedy

I've been using Blender since 2005 - making art with the games engine, films and more recently content for art installations.

6 Comments

  1. I have no experience of Azure/Amazon ECS etc and unfortunately it is really outside the scope of this project. There are other cloudy render farms solutions out there.

  2. Could this be used with a farm of low cost computers like the Raspberry Pi 4? Would there be any mileage in it or would it be cheaper to use more powerful PCs for the project?

Leave A Reply

To add a profile picture to your message, register your email address with Gravatar.com. To protect your email address, create an account on BlenderNation and log in when posting a message.

Advertisement

×