Open Source Renderfarm

vect00rzer00

Has anyone had a pleasant experience with open source network rendering software?

I thought it would be cool to set up a small home-made renderfarm. I will begin with 2 (master and slave) and consider adding more depending on my success. Unfortunatley I don't have the money to buy per-machine licenses. I'm still in school and my resources are limited. I have 2 machines with Windows 7 and access to files from Maya 2010.

lampekap

did you try octane renderen? it uses the gpu and is incredibly with some very nice results. I don't know though if it's the best renderer for your purposes.
If it suits you, you save alot of money, as you don't neccecaryly have to buy another pc, while the results are still as great.

renderhjs

maybe have a look at yavaray:
http://www.yafaray.org/
its free and opensource + I believe it can render on multiple nodes or computers. So far its often bundled with blender but maybe there is a way to use it with Maya as well.

r_fletch_r

Maya comes with back burner, have you checked its terms on render slaves. It may be like max's where you get unlimited render nodes per license.

vect00rzer00

Back burner's deal sounds great. If Back burner is like that for Max, I see no reason why it would be different for Maya. I am a student so I could try the student version of either software.

My goal for now is to successfully network render a ball. No hyper-fancy shaders, no texture maps, nothing fancy. Just a simple ball with a single light source.

Any other one's you guys can think of? I have viewed the previous two sites. Cool software, even though neither can network render... yet.

Dim

If you are interested in using Blender, you have a couple of options. Firstly, Blender has a built in network renderer. See information here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.5/Manual/Render/Engines/Netrender

Second, there's a free online distributed renderer using BURP (Big Ugly Rendering Project) called Renderfarm.fi. With that option, other people's computers will render your tasks while idling, and send back the result. It's sort of like torrents for rendering. Seems pretty cool, though I haven't tried it myself.

r_fletch_r

Keep us posted on how you do, Setting up backburner and max is pretty easy, just follow the manual and its a snap.

Some things to consider:
A File server is extremely usefull. Map the server to something like z: on all your computers and use that as a place to render to, and to store files such as textures and final gather maps,basically anything thats not within the scene file should be stored here.

If your going to be using more than 2 or 3 computers keep in mind that a Linux or Mac system is desirable for the file server as they can handle more incomming connections than a standard windows install. (Windows has a software cap).

Its really important to be neat with textures, and file dependencies.

Generally If you are using any plugins then all your render slaves need the same plugins or the render will not work.

Scenes created with certain plugins installed often leave behind remnants in your scene file which will stop it from network rendering on a system without the plugin, regardless of whether its in active use in the scene..be aware of this its a killer.

If your renders are crashing with max and backburner try renaming the viewcube plugin (Google for the file name its a common problem). it seems prone to crashing render slaves when rendering from a camera.... I dont know how the hell that got past QC