Rendering Using A Render Farm

Rendering images and even whole animations can be a very time-consuming task. It is the process of generating an image out of the data from 3D-objects. In addition to the geometry the data includes viewpoint, material, and lighting information. The rendering of an animation can run on a single personal computer for days or even longer.

Renderfarm

Big animation studios hire, or even have their own, huge renderfarm, where thousands of processors work together to generate an animation. There is also the possibility for private people to hire a renderfarm, however there is also a free possibility to render your animation.

Setting Up Farmerjoe

There are dozens of renderfarm or task-distributing software. After having checked and tested some of them I concluded "farmerjoe" to be the best solution. It is easy to set up and handle. All you need is a network and a share. First the software had to be installed on the share. Unlike many other software it was sufficient to adjust the configuration file on the master computer. This means entering the IP of the master and the paths of the output folder and the Blender software. Of course that had to be on the share to be accessible for all the computers.
Then the master had to be told to be the master: -enter in console : R:software/Farmerjoe_0.1.3/farmerjoe -master
The slaves had to be told to be slaves: -enter in console : R:software/Farmerjoe_0.1.3/farmerjoe -slave
And progress surveillance needed be activated: -enter in console : R:software/Farmerjoe_0.1.3/farmerjoe -appserver
To submit a job one has to load the file called "farmerjoe_submit.py" into Blenders text editor and hit ALT + P. Following the workflow is possible by entering http://[IP]:[port] into the browser. Example: http://172.16.4.50:2007

How To Save Rendertime

It is very important to chose jpg or another picture format as output, but not video! It may happen that in some frames constraints do not work properly (Picture). If you would have a video as output you needed probably to re-render a thousand frames just because of one or two wrong frames. Of further importance is not to use ray tracing or radiosity settings. They cause a huge amount of calculations and do not have a big impact on the image quality of such a project. One should also barely use the motion blur function. It gives fast motions a blurred effect to obtain a smoother motion. Thus it needs information from the previous and the next frame, leading to longer render times.