Render Farms - Do you use them?

throttlekitty

Do any of you use any external hardware to do renders or bakes? Has it been worth it for you?

I've been mulling over the idea of a cheaper USB Oven Box to offload these tasks to. Bitcoin miners seem to have gotten good mileage out of ALU-centric boards for working out hashes (or whatever the current trend is), can the same thing be done to knock renders/bakes out faster?

From what I've seen, a typical render farm setup uses standard CPUs, but why not specialize the hardware to the task? This likely means re-writing software to target such a system, right?

JedTheKrampus

Why not specialize the hardware to the task? Mostly because big studios already have immense render farms made of CPUs that run renderers that work on CPUs. The costs of acquiring specialized hardware for rendering and paying the Solidangle guys to port 100% of Arnold to it are not really feasible.

Bitcoin mining is a much different use case than rendering as it tends to operate on much smaller amounts of data. With textures getting bigger and bigger thanks to Mari, it's not necesssarily feasible to render for film on GPUs where you're limited to 3 GB of RAM for the most cost-effective choices. Plus, GPUs are still more difficult to program than CPUs, so offline renderers that use them tend to only offer a subset of functionality. The costs don't justify the potential benefits yet.

throttlekitty

I didn't set the scope very well, sorry. Good point on the costs, regardless. What I'm thinking of is something smaller and more game artist oriented, small studio or freelancer.

Even with a beefy system, an AO or curvature map takes quite a while to bake. On mine, I can't really do much serious work during that time. For home use, I could set up another computer to offload the task to, and that's what has me thinking about something more sensible. Something that only has the guts it needs and sits neatly in a little box on my desk so I can keep on working.

FULGORE

This definitely is something I'd like to do when/if I have the money - same with a little file server box for my working space

whats_true

Unreal has an option to bake out the lighting that would use all of the PCs in the office. This became a problem at first, as it was crazy noticeable that it was being used, but after the bugs got figured out, was really useful to speeding up the rendering process.