Article: Building Your Own Render Farm

Jim

Here's an article on tom's hardware on the subject.

Everyone reads articles about the immense number of processor hours required to create visual effects and animations for the latest films and TV shows. For example, render times totaled 40 million hours for Monsters vs. Aliens, 30 million hours for Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, and 6.6 million hours for Revenge of the Sith.

remus

thanks, thats an interesting read.

Jim

Oh good, because I didn't actually read it. I'll file it under 'Someday maybe.'

But, I have thought about how feasible it would be to use Drb (distributed ruby) to create a networked rendering solution where we could all share cycles.

remus

No idea how that would work, but if it means more rendering beef im interested dreams of indigo animations

Chris Fullmer

Shawn Tennant worked on turning his PSP into a render engine, running Linux, and then be able to turn many of them into a render farm. I think he succeeded to some extent.

I used to have about 4 machines hooked up at home as a mini render farm. It is remarkably useful. Its nice to be able to send a render of to other machines and keep working without the render hogging all resources.

Chris