This is a tutorial that goes into detail of how to set up a free render farm in Blender using blenders on Flamenco Library. Flamenco is a lightweight library that comes with a server, which they call a manager and a client that subscribes to the server, which they call a worker.
Aside from a little of your own time, everything in this process is free. You can download Blender from blender.org and you will also need to download Flamenco from flamenco.blender.org.
Unlike a typical Blender workflow where you render your animation project directly in Blender, tying up that instance of Blender as it renders, you can send your project to a render farm queue. This queue is managed by Flamenco where your projects get picked up and rendered by multiple computers on your network at the same time.
Unlike yesteryears where you basically needed a network engineering degree to set up a render farm, Flamenco makes it very easy. Within about 20 minutes you should be able to replace your current “render direct from Blender” workflow with this much more optimized way.
Yes, it is true that you can open up multiple instances of Blender on your computer at the same time. However, as most of us have experienced, if Blender is rendering especially complex scenes, it takes up a lot of your computer resources and can slow things down. What is nice about using a render farm is that you can send multiple projects to it and it will get queued up like a to-do list and render everything for you on other computers. This delegation of rendering your projects on other computers will keep your main workstation free from this production bottleneck.
So here’s a basic blender render Farm workflow. you likely have multiple scenes in a project and you are switching between them. You want to start rendering some rough drafts but you also want to continue working. So what you can do is for each Blender project, or separate scenes from the same project (perhaps different camera angles) instead of rendering them directly, you render them by sending them to Flamenco.
Flamenco will then order these projects that you send it and send the projects off to the other computers on your network to render the scenes so you can continue working. You can log on to the local Flamenco server in your browser at any time to view the progress. Usually you will want to render your animations in a lossless Image sequence like a PNG file.
Render time is based on the resolution and complexity of your animations. And so, like the cobbler’s elves, As long as you have everything set up properly, your animations should start showing up in the network folders you assigned them to.
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