What is a Render Farm#
A Render Farm is a network of computers called nodes that render computer animation.
Computer animation takes a lot of time to render, so a render farm speeds up this task by spreading out the work among many nodes.
If you only had 1 node on your render farm and wanted to render 100 frames and each frame took 1 hour to render, then it would take you 100 hours to render your animation.
If you had 100 nodes on your render farm, then that same shot would only take you 1 hour to render!
Animation Studio Render Farm#
The Animation Studio built its own Render Farm to solve the challenge of rendering computer animations. It was developed by Ammar Almahdy and then updated by Sam Naumann (both Middlebury undergraduates).
Find the Render Farm Website#
If you're on Middlebury's campus you can see the Animation Studio Render Farm website at
go/render/
Get the Render Farm Addon Code#
Use SVN to get the Render Farm Addon. (Make sure that you use Terminal to navigate to a good folder, like your /Users/your_username/ folder, before you run checkout.)
svn checkout svn://svn.animation.middcreate.net/render_farm_addon
This will get you the addon, which is just a code filel called render_farm_addon.py
Install the Addon into Blender#
Open Blender Edit->Preferences Go to the Addons tab Click the "Install" button Find "render_farm_addon.py" (It will be wherever you checkout out this SVN repository) When it installs you should see it in the Addons list, but it will be deactivated. Check the box next to its name to activate it.
Schedule Animation Jobs with the Addon#
After you install and activate the Render Farm Addon you can start Scheduling animation jobs.
- Open a .blend file that you'd like to render on the Render Farm.
- Make sure that you have committed all of your changes to SVN.
- Write down the revision number that you want to render. (This is the number that SVN reports back after a successful commit.)
- Render->Schedule Render Farm Job
- Set SVN Revision Number to the number that you wrote down.
- Start and End Frames are set to match your shot. You can adjust these if you only want to test a portion of your shot on the Render Farm.
- Leave Priority at 1 unless you suddenly want to render a shot before others that you've already scheduled. In that case, choose a higher number. Higher priority shots will render first.
- Click OK and look for a message at the bottom that says, Scheduling Successful...
- If you get an error, let me know.