DIY Blender Render Farm/Server! (How To)

Blender is an amazing piece of software that allows creators from all over the world to produce whatever their mind can imagine. However, one of the most unproductive parts of the creative process falls within the render time of your scene. In this video I’m going to show you how you can make use of the other computers sitting idle in your home to speed up your Blender renders!

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Written & Hosted by Chris
Shot & Edited by Chris
Thumbnail & Motion Graphics by Connor

[LokiScarletWasHere]

To prepare simulations for render farms, you need to bake all simulations. (the Bake All Dynamics button) You could use a NAS and do your work in an NFS (not Samba) share, as you can then mount the share as any path you want and just mount it the same on all devices, but baking is just absolutely necessary for network rendering if you want a guarantee that the nodes won't fuck up between each other.

[vaanssj]

Thank you so much, I've seen people talk about render farms and the usefulness of on but nobody has ever shared a tutorial on setting one up.

[dirtcreatured]

Just got 2 3060s to use with my m1 max, super stoked to set it up and test it out now that crowdrender supports  silicon

[andrewphoto]

OH MAN cant wait to build this Linux server. gonna add a 3060. and couple that with my main rig 3080 . its gonna be fun and help me test these skills from networking classes

[KamuiS]

As an alternative to copying simulation data, you could use symlinks over SMB or NFS to the data on all of the rendernodes. With that you could just hit render and i'ts all already visible to all your nodes. :)

[tubeMonger]

Thanks for the instructions. Your video was the first and a good starter for me. I hope I can dodge Samba by using Linux on the farm as well as on the main computer.

[OffSetImaging]

Can crowd render assign a single node a whole frame instead of parsing it up? Sometimes a large amount of time is in the scene build time and not the render itself. So preferably I’d be able have a node per frame.

[LuminaMentis]

Thanks! You helped me a lot... but i think an old pc as a nas whit Open Media Vault running on it is much more affective to use.

[Iwantapplez]

4:59 you culd get over that by baking the particle/physics sims into keyframes

[fritzhopper]

Great how to video. Great to see some plugin finally taking advantage of multiple machines. There are some issues but otherwise it is brilliant to me. Really wanna see it support Apple Silicon Macs sometime in the future.

[Young_Zealous]

i bet all the trumpsupporters are loving the hand gestures lol

[jasolively]

Is there a limit to how many pcs can be used? Also could you use a ps4 in the place of a slave node? Does this method use the cpus together to improve veiw port performance? Final question, would it be comparable to use several pcs and render frame blocks out for animation?

[simpernchong]

Great video. Thanks so much. Gonna try this eventually. Thanks again.

[arsenal]

Thank you so much for the video,
I'm looking to do a setup just like this!
If you have any other recommended videos, whether by you or someone else, for more info on any setup please share.
Or even better if you learn more about different improvements after using this for a while that would be a great follow up video.

[ryannutt]

Thanks for this. Came just at the right time.

[DiyintheGhetto]

My question is now that you have a render farm. how do you let the public use it?

[wagnerdavi]

PARECE MUITO BOM, MAS ACHO QUE SE FOSSEM TODOS PROCESSADORES DA XEON SERIAM MUITO MAIS RAPIDOS. OBRIGADO POR COMPARTILHAR O TESTE, ABRAÇO

[csellers]

2:46 is there a reason you went with version 2.92 when at 2:59 it says it goes up until 2.93? I'm trying to set it up but my nodes are stuck on sync "uploading... 1%" but now I'm wondering if it's because I went with version 2.93.9

[graygrandeza]

I need some help :( My renders using the crowdrender seems to be slower than using JUST the main PC to render. Am I doing something wrong?

[EnricoPra]

What if i have addons and the other computer doesnt have that addons, can it still work/render properly?