Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Distributed Rendering for the People
Renderfarm.fi takes advantage of the distributable nature of rendering and the strong sense of community
among Blender users to offer an extraordinary free distributed rendering solution.
Renderfarm.fi uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software to enable
volunteerstodonatetheirowncomputer'sunusedprocessortimetotheproject,thuscreatingapotentiallyhuge,
worldwide, community-driven render farm that can be used by anybody.
There are a few restrictions on the kind of content that is suitable for rendering on Renderfarm.fi. The main
one is that the
.blend
files and resulting renders must be licensed under a Creative Commons open license.
This is partly out of principle, in the spirit of openness and community, but there is also a practical reason for
it. The renders are being carried out on strangers' machines, after all. If you want to keep your work secret, or
ifyou'redoingprofessional workforclients, apaid service isprobably more suitable. But forartists, hobbyists,
or anybody working on personal projects, Renderfarm.fi offers an unbelievably cool and powerful service, and
infactitmaybethe
only
affordablewaytorendercertaincontentforindependentprojectsinareasonabletime-
frame. There are a few other technical restrictions that are currently being worked out. Composite nodes and
Python scripts are not yet supported.
Finally, the service is intended for animations, not still frames. You will probably not get much of a speed-
up in rendering still frames anyway. There is some overhead in queuing, uploading, and downloading, which
means that quick rendering projects do not benefit from using the service. As a rule of thumb, if a frame takes
less than 20 seconds to render, you will not benefit from using Renderfarm.fi. On the other hand, if you're ren-
dering animations with 4K resolution frames in Cycles at 2000 samples, as I did recently, you'll find a massive
increase using Renderfarm.fi rather than your own resources.
Using the Add-on
Using Renderfarm.fi from within Blender couldn't be easier. The first thing you need to do is to register an ac-
count on the website, at
http://renderfarm.fi
.
Once you've done this, you can begin rendering your work.
1.
To render on Renderfarm.fi, you must activate the Renderfarm.fi add-on in the Render add-ons, as
shown in
Figure 4-35
.
2.
When the add-on has been activated, you'll see a Renderfarm.fi option in the Render Engine drop-
down in the Info header, as shown in
Figure 4-36
.
Select this as your renderer.
