Build home render farm and next...

#1

I am just starting to build my home render farm.

I have 6 computer and all are connected with network hub.

My main computer has UltraVNC application to control the each sub computers without every mouse,keyboard and monitor. So, I can use my main computer’s mouse and keyboard to control every sub computers and can see its screen by changing IP address. I defined manual IP address from 192.168.0.225 to 192.168.0.230.

I would like to know what is the next step. How is the actual render process going to be?

One of my weird ideas is just trying to copy a Maya Scene file to every computer, and starting the render from each computer with each separated of same length frames from a file.

If you could give me any advice or instruction of practical way to use this render farm in Maya basis, It will be most appreciated.

I would like to have some advice about Backburner or any recommendable render manager like Renderpal or else.

Best.

#2

Typically a farm is controlled with a queue manager like Backburner. The queue manager will coordinate what machines render what frames and send out the commands to start the renders on each machine for you. I think Backburner comes bundled with Maya but there are other options out there. For this to function you’ll need to be working from a universally accessible location like a network share that all of the machines have mapped.

#3

I saw a tutorial video to build render farm. There is a bunch of small windows on screen that shows every computer’s cpu performance and progress. Is Backburner working on this? Or is there any other nice applications to do this work can you recommend? Thanks in advance.

#4

http://www.thinkboxsoftware.com/deadline/

http://www.royalrender.de/

These two are among most common and pretty good rendering managers.
It does depend on your budget as well, but manually starting renders on each comp will get pretty tedious soon…
Check out around net to get more info about any of these how they work… it will give you better image of whole process as well.

Beside that you need to consider proper sharing network location so that all computers can access project scenes and rendering folders. Copying project to each computer and setting up manually is really time consuming and not practical at all

#5

Thanks a lot!
Have a nice day :slight_smile:

#6

I wrote this article that you’ll probably find helpful:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/how-to-network-lots-of-dumb-computing-muscle-in-a-fast-efficient-render-farm/

#7

If your on Windows and have small scene files, you could probably get away with using a shared folder on your workstation. Just map the shared folder using “map network drive” on each of your computers, and assign it the same letter on each computer. If all your drive letters line up, they should all pick up the scene and all other files just fine.

#8

ya, on OS X and Linux, you can just use symlinks or custom SMB mount points to do a similar thing.