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!
Links -
Crowdrender: www.crowd-rend...
Ubuntu Samba Tutorial: ubuntu.com/tut...
Socials -
Instagram: / topspecmedia
Connor's Instagram: / conrgraphics
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.

[@autobr_]

thanks man

[@vaanssj5]

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.

[@andrewphoto4750]

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

[@dirtcreature3d]

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

[@PopoRamos]

i just bought a 3090ti to add to my old pc, im using a M1 Ultra as my main rig. Hopefully it speeds things up, otherwise ill just render to a network drive on all machines using render place holders

[@aarrondias9950]

@@PopoRamos did it work?

[@PopoRamos]

@@aarrondias9950 the 3090ti blew all my expectations out of the water, putting my Mac studio to shame. 1:30 seconds down to a mind blowing 14 seconds. I have connected both computers on 10Gbit Ethernet for fast transfer speeds and I use the screen sharing app on my Mac to control the PC (no extra screen, mouse or keyboard necessary for what I’m doing) As far as crowded Render it wasn’t very reliable between the Mac studio and windows computer working together, and when it did work it was slower than rendering individually. The Mac only shaves an hour on a 8 hour Animation using the PC, so i have been rendering on the PC and using the Mac for other work.

[@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.

[@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. :)

[@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.

[@yacinemegrah]

is there a better method for when u have, multiple slow pcs, and one fast computer that can help all those pcs catch up?

[@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.

[@jasolively1986]

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?

[@fritzhopper5145]

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.

[@zilog1]

or just not use a mac and get a real computer not made to take advantage of non tech savvy people and actually repairable 90% of the parts thrown in a land fill when it dies :p Im glad people can control their consumer habits to make the world a little better of a place and not feed unethical capitalistic practices. Air pods are the new K-cup. literally made to throw away when they die and fill the land fill as much as possible in the name of profits. man i love it then a company makes something that would normally last 20 years more consumable because it makes more money for them to die in 5 years instead. absolutely incredible. and people that complain "just let me enjoy things" are part of the problem and are an enabler of this problem no one seems to care about ^w^ #RightToRepair

[@Iwantapplez109]

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

[@arsenal4444]

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.

[@wagnerdavi2229]

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

[@DiyintheGhetto]

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

[@simpernchong]

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

[@JeremyAbles01]

If you are connecting via the network do you need windows 10/11 pro? I have had issues connecting via network to other pc's on home editons since switching from windows 7?

[@aeonbreak4728]

BRO 2 QUESTIONS 1- does this work over internet or only LAN? 2- does it also improve viewport rendering???

[@SplitScreamOFFICIAL]

Good news blender 3.5 fixed viewport rendering

[@aeonbreak4728]

@@SplitScreamOFFICIAL how exactly?

[@graygrandeza6126]

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?

[@mikecarlson6416]

cool video and cool experiment

[@csellers900]

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

[@csellers900]

I tried installing 2.92 on two of the computers but I'm still having the same issue

[@EnricoPra]

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

[@ryannutt]

Thanks for this. Came just at the right time.

[@papierbndc]

I installed Blender 2.92.0 and nothing seems to happen when I import the .zip addon in blender. I restarted it but it just doesnt seem to work ._. any idea why?

[@jarek0737]

8:20 Sounds like you need a designated NAS.. Within the NAS preferably setting it as the CACHE file system for renders meaning you will need, at least 2.5gb/s network set up. Which would require network switch and NICS in the systems between all the nodes and NAS.. Than comes the hours and I mean hours of configuring and setting up the NAS as your Cache and setting up the rest of the network depending on how many nodes you have. It gets expensive going this route though, unless you can find some used enterprise hardware on Ebay.. The thing is you get it all together like I have.. Than you run into issues with bugs along with finding that some equipment requires paying for subscriptions to use especially if you go for 10GB/s. Do your research before, you may think this is route you choose..

[@MrAcuta73]

Weird question....if I turn my current Threadripper Gen1 computer into an NAS server, can I still slave it as a render node? Just prognosticating, atm. Need to upgrade this machine (Gen1 Threadripper = Feels Bad, Man). But? I know this thing has a ton of compute power still. Thinking about turning it into an NAS for personal/family/friend use, but hopefully tap the Proc and RTX 2070 (OC and under water) as a render node. It only has 32Gb of RAM, atm...but can up that if needed. Damn Threadripper has a cap of 1Tb of RAM....think I'm good. Not sure I could get 1Tb in 8 DIMM anyway.

[@charchitmishra]

can we use diffrent type of cpu's in a render farm or only same type cpu's

[@Young_Zealous]

i bet all the trumpsupporters are loving the hand gestures lol

[@DragonworksAnimators]

Im using a dell optiplex 7010 and a dell insprion all in one 2020 pc and a gaming pc

[@obaidakotainy8060]

Hello, I have a studio and I need to build a server (farm) to render Unreal Engien 5 on it - what is the best server to do so? please anyone can help comment to let me know.

[@80robina]

Is there a render farm manager that can be used for Maya

[@osmmanipadmehum]

I guess gui is needed to add the addon on blender on the nodes...

[@CodyHoskin]

Can I access my render node over the internet?

[@ashvinpkumar574]

should it be on the same network

[@hartjd]

yes

[@laughinglads642]

Know of any good render farms for unreal engine

[@zilog1]

Its amazing that mac users never have a computer powerful enough to do simple shit like render a blender scene properly in a reasonable amount of time forcing them to buy/use more hardware. I love it when a multi trillion dollar business does this on purpose to up-sale more equipment and the users are too stubborn/lazy to use something else ^w^ It just works right?

[@TopSpecMedia]

I assume you're talking about MacBooks, and this is true with the older, thinner, more power hungry Intel models but benchmarks look promising in Blender's quest to create an Apple Silicon native build, which they are even working with Apple engineers on! It would be great to see a M1 Max Chip be competitive with a similar x86 machine while generating less heat and having less thermal constraints, which I believe is possible. In terms of Mac Pro, these folks seem happy: www.lunaranimation.com/lunar-blog/2021/03/02/mac-pro-a-year-in-the-studio But there's a reason why most of the 3D/VFX industry are not using Macs (CUDA)

[@zilog1]

@@TopSpecMedia Yes. the mac studio and pros are a fine acception.

[@zilog1]

@@TopSpecMedia I still wont buy or use one ever because #RightToRepair if i cant fix it myself without some sort of softlock or downloading to an older OS version after a trillion dollar company just basically tells me "no" then I dont own one. I have some in my possession yes, but it is not my property nor will it ever be my property until apple becomes more transparent and upgrade/repair friendly. It is apples property.. they use the convent byproducts of safety and security as a crutch to get away with this. They socially normalize a disposable future more and more over time and other companies follow because jobs said something about stealing to make it seem like its an okay thing to do. the ownership of things we purchase is more important than most make it to be and apple is the leader of this trend...

[@weslley3dezao]

Maravilhoso, parabéns.

[@andreluizcardosodemendonca3292]

Muito bom. Parabéns!

[@alfred5454]

`/` is said as "slash" (not dash)

[@akongas]

Zomg! You would think crowdrender would handle physics properly

[@playbyan1453]

Why not pack file

[@antonihalainen9099]

😮

[@victorwarner319]

can you do this with c4d?

[@sayu181]

This isn’t Coca Cola freestyle

[@TopSpecMedia]

Sorry bro

[@underdeveloped4257]

I came here for information about rendering requirements Instead I'm getting advice I didn't ask for and another tutorial on how to download stuff from the internet oh never mind there is some info

[@AchwaqKhalid]

I am your *999th* like 👍

[@neilwlobo]

Dude thinks we all have PC's Lying around. Bruh.

[@orange3567]

This is literally for people that do. I have 2 laptops and a PC. If you don't then why bother watching the video. It literally says DIY AT HOME. Meaning you will need make the render farm at home with your own computers

[@miguelbaca8086]

Imagine clicking a video about building a blender render farm and being upset at the fact that you need multiple computers…..

[@CreeperITA104]

I do, i have 5 free pcs

[@DragonworksAnimators]

I have 4 computer 2 are available for rendering

[@noahlemon7870]

Shit I do that's why I'm here

[@YuriyKhovansky]

I'm really sure you can build it yourself. I did this 2 weeks ago thanks to the Woodglut plans.

[@moodswinging4406]

my god but your room is tidy! thanks for the tuorial