Let's talk Render Farming

Okay, here's the setup:

I'm moving out of New York to greener pastures of Georgia. Bigger house and a sweet basement where I can perform all my diabolic schemes between cooking dinner, changing diapers and mowing the lawn.

My key pet-project will be to create a better rendering environment for myself with this new amount of living space. Though my dual processor PC has been a work horse for all my little projects here and there ... I want to build my own render farm ... or at least, a signifigant at-home server setup that can render in a few hours what I tend to take a day.

I read threads online here that you pros refer to your job servers, etc, etc and I'm not looking to blow millions that I don't have on some sort of corporate mainframe system. I just want to build a few fast servers to render 3DS Max animations.

Here's what I already know and tried: 3DS Max comes with Backburner, which allows you to network two or more computers to render frames. For a noob like me, when I finally hooked up my computer to the first available laptop I could get my hands on, it was a special thing to see both computers hand-shaking and sharing frame work. I originally thought all that work would give me a nice .mov file ... turns out they just create individual frames and I have to string things later ... but no big deal.

But the laptop is too slow, obviously. I'm willing to invest a little and do it right, but I can't find anywhere on the net that will talk in plain english 'How To Set Up a PC Based Rendering System For 3DS Max'.

In my mind, I see two or three racked SATA drives running comparably or faster than my desktop (Pentium D 3.00 ghz , 2.0 gigs of ram) ... but I know there is more out there ... and maybe cheaper alternatives.

So let's talk render farming. What do you guys do for your multi-computer rendering and can someone give me a play by play setup. Even though I eventually gotten BackBurner to work, it wasn't before it crashed millions of times. I poked around and discovered there are other render softwares that doe the same thing ... but things just got complicated there after.

Your help would be greatly appreciated.

Corey

ok well i used for my last 3d project 15 pc from my school lab and hooked them up with final render (cuz iwas rendering in final render) and i never did it before but it was very easy. on the slave machines i just started the server.exe from final render and then i typed the ip of every pc in the master allowed from the firewall and tadaa they saw eache other and when i pressed render all pc's started to render in one frame most people said that its better when they render alone frames but i was happy with it

and once i did it this summer with c4d that is even easyer but i guess this doesn't help you very much :S

well, i am running frantic's deadline at home to put all my computers to use when rendering.
It has a few more bells and whistles than backburner and It's actually free to download and you do not require a license if you are only running two 2 slaves.

The documentation and install instructions are really good and helped even a noob like me to get this working properly.

check it out
http://www.franticfilms.com/software/pr ... /download/

hi guys

i think desktopepics needs some information about hardware setup too, i mean, what to buy?
im in the same situation, i was wondering about a simple and cheap 3d studio max (vray rendered) home-render farm so ill follow this and maybe you can help me too : )

diemacht, are you talking about 15 simple pcs?

cheers!

Dell machines are apparantly good (and cheap) as renderslaves.

Most of MAKE's farm is Dell machines.

well. despite the good thing in dells services, you could easy build a really cheap slave with q6600 cores.

hi guys,
excuse my ignorance, are you talking about simple desktop dell pc's or maybe some kind of rack thing with a lot of reduced pcs on it?

I have a Core 2 Quad, a Core 2 Duo, a 3800x2, and I'm about to build another Core 2 Duo spare computer (have a lot of extra parts, like a spare 2gb DDR2 RAM, an extra 550w ,PSU, etc.) so I will have a good bit of computing POWUH.

Here's some stuff I have read about that.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1 ... 797,00.asp

This is a great paper on the topic. Its 23 pages. Good stuff.
http://www.visualz.com/

Mark Christensen's blog
Distributed Rendering: Life on the Farm
I have an old friend from college who grew up in a farm house built during Shakespeare’s lifetime in Shrewsbury (Shropshire, England). A long time (over a decade) ago I was on the phone with him during my workday, explaining that I had time to chat because I was rendering. His reply was that rendering consisted of recycling pig and poultry carcasses. I wonder what he would make of a “render farm.”

A question came up about the excellent Nucleo Pro, which distributes renders across the processors in your multi-proc (and/or multl-core) machine. What about when you have procs distributed across a network and want your own render farm, a place where images grow on their own while you continue to work (or even sleep)? Before Nucleo there was X-Factor, which shipped with After Effects and created RAM Previews with network machines (an idea which turned out to be impractical, leading the product to be discontinued).
As many readers know there are several third-party solutions to help distribute an After Effects (or other 2d compositing or 3d animation) renders across a network. This has been possible in After Effects since version 6.0, which added automated rendering as part of the Scripting feature set. But Adobe doesn’t provide the means to do it; instead, they and other animation software developers provide the command-line “hooks” needed to let third-party software do it.

Thing is, this software, at least initially, isn’t so easy to install or maintain, and it tends to be larger studios with dedicated IT support who have the knowledge that it even exists, let alone how to implement it (hint: it’s not generally a matter of double-clicking an installer, instead involving setting up a domain controller on a centralized server and optimizing the network for speed and load-balancing).

This article from over a year ago lists some of the options available at that time and describes some of what is involved with implementing them. Since that time, Deadline from Frantic Films has appeared on the scene, which among other things apparently obviates the need for a server, but which is, alas, Windows-only. Also not listed from the Mac-only side is Qmaster, developed by Apple specifically for distributing Shake renders (but allegedly capable of distributing other applications’ renders as well - well, Maya, at least).

Thinking about this stuff revives a fantasy I had when the Mac Mini first appeared: get a bunch of those things with a little extra RAM and a gigabit switch and build a little farm right in my own studio.

I’ve heard others express this idea as well but haven’t encountered an actual implementation, and I’d love to hear (in the comments, perhaps?) from anyone who has created a cheap and easy (sub-$10K) render farm in a small studio, whether Mac or Windows based.