render farming

Another process I wanted to look into, after experiencing such large render times, was the method of render farming. It is common practice for animation studios to use a render farm, where numerous machines each render a small batch of frames at the same time to reduce the over all render time of the animation. 

One example of  a modern day render farm is the one used by LucasFilm, LucasArts and ILM, the specifications are as follows:

The campus has a 13,500-square-foot data center, which houses a render farm, file servers and storage systems. The set-up includes more than 3,000 AMD processors, proprietary render-management tools, allowing desktop workstations to be added to the render farm pool after hours, expanding the processing capacity to more than 5,000 processors.

Here is some more information about the impressive tech employed at LucasFilm’s Letterman Digital Arts Center:

• A state-of-the-art high-performance data network with more than 300 10-gigabyte ports and 1,500 1-gigabyte ports — the largest in the entertainment industry
• Fiber-optics cable pulled to every artist desktop, enabling Lucasfilm to deliver high-resolution images to each digital artist
• 600 miles of cable throughout the four buildings on the campus
• Raised floors throughout the building, opening the layout of the studio and enabling the workspace to be reconfigured with each new project
• Data storage (at opening) of more than 100 terabytes
• A Media Data Center to host custom-designed media servers to deliver high-resolution images to the on-campus digital theaters, screening rooms and desktops
  Systems for image and sound editing, color management and correction, and high-speed compositing
• A Media Control Room that manages media input, output, format conversions and duplication

This is one hell of a system which is very similar to the one used on the film Avatar which still took 2 days per frame. But a render farm is to render different frames at the same time so you could get 100 frames done in two days by using numerous machines comprising a render farm, but this would cost thousands and thousands of pounds. a home render farm could be made for about £3000. this is using the following components:

• SUPERMICRO MBD-H8DG6-F-O E-ATX Form Server Motherboard
• 2X AMD Opteron 6348 Abu Dhabi 2.8GHz 12MB L2 Cache 16MB L3 Cache Socket G34 115W 12-Core Server Processor
• 8X Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600 MHz RAM
• Corsair RM Series 850 Watt ATX/EPS 80PLUS Gold-Certified Power Supply
• 4X WD Red 3 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache
• Cooler Master HAF 932 Advanced Blue Edition, Full Tower Computer Case
• 2X Noctua NH-U9DO A3 AMD Opteron, 4 Dual Heat-pipe SSO Bearing Quiet CPU Cooler
• iStarUSA BPU-340SATA-BPL 3×5.25″ to 4×3.5″ SAS/SATA 6.0 Gb/s Hot-Swap Cage
• SAMSUNG 840 Pro Series MZ-7PD256BW 2.5″ 256GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
• ASUS DRW-24IBST Internal DVD R/RW Burner
• GeForce GTX 590 video card (used)

But after researching into render farming, I discovered the online render farm business, which is quite large which was surprising considering I hadn't known about online rendering. but in retrospect this makes perfect sense.

I decided to try and get a quick quote to see how much this service costs.

I first went with a company called RenderNow. You can get a quick quote by entering certain information such as frame render times and quantity of frames.

My render times were 10 minutes per frame and a frame quantity of 7200.

The price they quoted me was £422.60 and the quoted time was 3 hours.

I decided to get another quote to see if they were competitive prices.

Another company I tried to get a quote with was called TURBOrender, I logged in the same details as above and I was quoted £538. with a render time of 6 hours.

There are several things to note though, the RenderNow website and user friendliness was a lot more professional and easier to use with cheaper prices and quicker times so there are definitely the better companies to choose from, but is it worth it?

If a 5 minute animation is going to cost 500 pounds to have rendered, you would need to do 30 minutes of animation to justify buying a home render farm although the render times wouldn't be as fast but it would certainly help speed those render times up.

Considering my future path it is definitely something I would consider making myself to acquire a decent render farm in order to render my animations out quicker. and if I'm going create numerous short animations this would be a perfect solution to keep the process going efficiently.