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I am out of touch with the latest and greatest Blender features. If best/highest fidelity renders are required, can Blender scale with a render farm? Last I he

I am out of touch with the latest and greatest Blender features. If best/highest fidelity renders are required, can Blender scale with a render farm? Last I heard that was the advantage of the propriety/in-house alternatives.

hamaluik 2y ago
Yup! https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/home https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/home Is a great community example of this.
- ad-astra 2y ago
  I made my own distributed render orchestrator that supports Cycles + custom plugins. It uses Modal’s cloud compute APIs to spawn jobs on up to 20x containers with an L40S GPU (like 80% as fast as a 4090 with tons more VRAM) each. It ain’t cheap but it’s absurdly fast, and much easier in terms of cash flow than outright buying the equivalent GPUs. https://github.com/stoicsuffering/distributed-blender-render-modal https://github.com/stoicsuffering/distributed-blender-render...
  - sbarre 2y ago
    That is possibly the most original README I've seen in a long time. I will admit it's a bit.. obfuscated, though?
    - remify 2y ago
      Second title should have been named the Book of Job IMO
      - ad-astra 2y ago
        Sure why not, updated.
    - ad-astra 2y ago
      Thanks for checking it out! And yeah, I’m not expecting it to gain much traction, just having fun with it.
zoky 2y ago
Any embarrassingly parallel task can scale almost infinitely by throwing more resources at it.
- touisteur 2y ago
  I think I've seen some amazing Blender hacker put Cycles to the test on a machine with both NVIDIA and Intel GPUs. Love it that their API seems that portable and able to parrallelize on heterogeneous hardware. Amazing software work.
  - Doxin 2y ago
    Getting blender to run on my NVIDIA GPU and AMD CPU simultaneously is as easy as checking two boxes in the settings. It's not usually worth it since the GPU absolutely smokes the CPU. it's a testament to how well blender is made that it works at all, let alone that trivially.
sznio 2y ago
a stupid-simple approach would be to split up the render betweeen machines by manually starting it on each one and setting different frame ranges to render
- diggan 2y ago
  Once you feel like that isn't enough anymore, you can also start dividing each frame into a grid of N cells and distribute that :) As long as the rendering is deterministic, you'd just join the cells into a complete frame on the coordinator.
orlp 2y ago
An 1.5 hour movie at 24 FPS has ~130k frames to render. As long as you have less machines than that the parallelization is essentially free.
sangnoir 2y ago
IIRC, the Blender Foundation's Open Source movies have been rendered on render farms from the very first one, produced over 20 years ago. This predates Cycles/Eevee, but I don't think it's something they'd regress on.

hamaluik 2y ago

Yup! https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/home https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/home Is a great community example of this.

ad-astra 2y ago
I made my own distributed render orchestrator that supports Cycles + custom plugins. It uses Modal’s cloud compute APIs to spawn jobs on up to 20x containers with an L40S GPU (like 80% as fast as a 4090 with tons more VRAM) each. It ain’t cheap but it’s absurdly fast, and much easier in terms of cash flow than outright buying the equivalent GPUs. https://github.com/stoicsuffering/distributed-blender-render-modal https://github.com/stoicsuffering/distributed-blender-render...
- sbarre 2y ago
  That is possibly the most original README I've seen in a long time. I will admit it's a bit.. obfuscated, though?
  - remify 2y ago
    Second title should have been named the Book of Job IMO
    - ad-astra 2y ago
      Sure why not, updated.
  - ad-astra 2y ago
    Thanks for checking it out! And yeah, I’m not expecting it to gain much traction, just having fun with it.

zoky 2y ago

Any embarrassingly parallel task can scale almost infinitely by throwing more resources at it.

touisteur 2y ago
I think I've seen some amazing Blender hacker put Cycles to the test on a machine with both NVIDIA and Intel GPUs. Love it that their API seems that portable and able to parrallelize on heterogeneous hardware. Amazing software work.
- Doxin 2y ago
  Getting blender to run on my NVIDIA GPU and AMD CPU simultaneously is as easy as checking two boxes in the settings. It's not usually worth it since the GPU absolutely smokes the CPU. it's a testament to how well blender is made that it works at all, let alone that trivially.

sznio 2y ago

a stupid-simple approach would be to split up the render betweeen machines by manually starting it on each one and setting different frame ranges to render

diggan 2y ago
Once you feel like that isn't enough anymore, you can also start dividing each frame into a grid of N cells and distribute that :) As long as the rendering is deterministic, you'd just join the cells into a complete frame on the coordinator.

orlp 2y ago

An 1.5 hour movie at 24 FPS has ~130k frames to render. As long as you have less machines than that the parallelization is essentially free.

sangnoir 2y ago

IIRC, the Blender Foundation's Open Source movies have been rendered on render farms from the very first one, produced over 20 years ago. This predates Cycles/Eevee, but I don't think it's something they'd regress on.