So! I've been searching for a render farm software that is easy to use, free, and gives me full control over what the software is doing. I've tried solutions like Sheep-It, but that eats up your internet connection because it takes your computing power to render who knows what. So this software which I recently stumbled upon seems to be a solution to my issue, but I need to know what outlandish things that are most likely a waste of time it can and can't do. So here are my questions:
Can it render up to 8K? (7860x4320)
Is there an OS limitation?(Windows 10, Mac OS High Sierra)
does it support old devices?(Geforce GT 620, Intel Pentium D)
Do I have to have a fast network switch?(I have 1000Mbp/s, so not actually an issue)
Is there a certain amount of resources you need to allocate?(I have only 1GB of RAM in one of the systems)
Is there a limit or minimum amount of systems you need to connect?(besides the first 2)
Do you need to allocate any amount of storage?
And, is it actually easy to use?(Haven't heard from support yet)
System Specs
Optiplex 745 #1:
Intel Pentium D 2C/2T @ 3.4Ghz
6GB of DDR2 RAM
Geforce GT 620, 1GB VRAM DDR3 overclocked to 910Mhz
Custom Optiplex Motherboard
1TB storage
280W PSU
Optiplex 745 #2:
Intel Pentium D 2C/2T @3.4Ghz
1GB of DDR2 RAM
Integrated Graphics
Custom Optiplex Motherboard
640GB of Storage
280W PSU
iMac 27 2015:
Intel Core i5 4C/4T @ 3.3Ghz
16GB of DDR3 Laptop RAM
AMD Radeon R7 M290, 2GB VRAM (type unknown)(clock speed unknown)
Custom iMac Motherboard
1TB of Storage
Unkown PSU wattage
Thanks, Tim
Hi James, thanks for the info. I am using an IMac 27 inch which means it has a 5k monitor, and so whenever I try to render anything I want to have it at the highest resolution that is sensibly avalible to the public, even though I’m not paying some 4000 dollars to get the dell one. It’s nice for me to be able to zoom into an image and not immediately make out single color pixels. And on a side note, who’s ever wanted to run 32 bit MacOS? I have a 2010 MacBook Pro and it was running MacOS 64 bit on it.(Until replaced with windows 10)
Thanks, Tim
Crikey Tim! 8k? Are you rendering bill boards? Cool:D
Lets deal with each one by one
1. 8K, well it does 4k fine, 8k is unknown territory. Give it a try maybe and let me know how you go, the only limitation here is that at 4k, tiles from each node can be 30MB in the multi open exr format (multiple layers and passes). So a reasonable network might be a good idea.
If you're doing a still image then this limitation might not be so bad, but for an animation it adds to the total render time each frame. We're working on ways to squish this down so that each tile for each frame (there would be three in your case, but one is on the computer you start rendering from, it doesn't need to go across the network).
The addon works cross platform, you can mix and match nodes (our sort of official name for 'computers') with different OS's. We officially support Linux, Mac and windows (64 bit only). We've tested Ubuntu, Kubuntu and xubuntu distributions (we have a thing for ubuntu it seems).
As for old devices, if you can run blender, you can run this software. By blender I mean the current download supports blender 2.79. It is supposed to work with 2.78 but we broke that about a week ago, now trying to come up with a fix that is 'sensible'.
Networks switches? I use wifi mostly in my testing and thats fine for HD, Im rendering 4K in a lab with 100Mbps and that works fine.
There's no minimum, well, one machine? As for the max, thats set to 1000 nodes.
Storage, yep, each node will store its render tiles and the client will store the render tiles of each node. You can delete these after you've finished though as the directories are auto generated, just don't do it while blender and the addon are running, it will go boom.
Ease of use I guess is pretty good? Its what we've been praised for (when it works). This is an alpha though so please bear in mind that though we're doing our best to make it user friendly, its got a bit of roughness to it. The documentation is also lacking, but we do have a video demo that shows the important bits and discusses limitations as well, here's the link to that -> https://youtu.be/vI5uQtKGzRU
If you have registered for testing, complimentary support comes with that :) feel free to hit us up by e-mail if you have questions and concerns and all the best trying it out, we'll be in touch soon to find out what you thought of it.
James