What is a Render Farm? CGI artists need many computers for VFX/Animation, like Pixar-ILM-Dreamworks!

[@jonjacksongrieger255]

Currently watching this with no WiFi and 1 bar.

[@chrismofer]

I used to think that render farms rendered in some special way that allows multiple computers to work together on each frame. I recently found out that they're usually much simpler and fairly easy to make one if you already have a portable renderer of some kind. for instance I setup 6 different machines running copies of LightWave, and connected them all to a shared folder where the scene files, objects, etc were stored. They also share an output folder. then i simply tell the first machine to render frames 1-100, second machine to do 101-200, third to do 201-300, etc etc so each machine gets an even share of the total frames. One multi-core machine can run multiple instances as fast as it can serve one instance, so my 6 core machine can have it's own 6 concurrent renderers each linked to their own core via the task manager. LightWave and most other 3D packages have their own render coordinators that automate this process and can clock in or out CPUs as they become available until all frames are done. Back in the day as soon as you were done modeling on your workstation you'd start up the render farm node program so all night it could be producing frames.

[@simtubx]

Just found your channel. Really great stuff. We’re looking at a few dual epyc racks lately for our in-house rendering needs at an architecture firm. It’s been so difficult to explain the need and costs

[@महरा-ड2म]

Thank You ! 🙂🙏

[@DennisTamayo]

The render farm is slower than game engines.

[@INTJames]

Because they're rendering very high resolution for film so it looks real, games have to be rendered in real time so the quality is lower. It works for movies because you're only rendering it one time so it doesn't matter how long it takes once it's rendered it's rendered. The game engine is faster because it needs to render everything in real time, sacrificing detail.

[@DennisTamayo]

@@INTJames Well, game engines like Unreal Engine have a option to render it in 4K.

[@cappuccino-1721]

@@DennisTamayo but 4K resolution is just part of the detail process. Most animated movies (and many CGI scenes in live action movies) are rendered in 8k with a much higher polygon count for crisper and more realistic images. Also more calculations are done per frame as apposed to a video game. And Ray tracing is much more intense in movies

[@DennisTamayo]

@@cappuccino-1721 Game engines can be good for rendering 3D CGI in commercials, like the future M&M's commercials.

[@CupOfJoeVFX]

Game engines have their increasing place, but heavy volumetric, sims, or massive teams still rely HEAVILY on CPU render farms. We also help create GPU farms, so there is GPU rendering but its still distributed batch rendering. Lastly, making dailies and other procedural and automated batch processes use render farms en-masse, even though its not technically "rendering." In total core hours these short process are a smaller percentage of core-hours BUT they are often a significant percentage of the NUMBER of tasks a render farm is schedule.