On-premises Vray+Rhino Render Farm

[bpbpbp]

Hi,

I'm supporting approximately 5x full-time renderers. I am not a user of the software myself, but am working with the team to optimise the environment. A lot of 3d renders are produced and they can take up to 8 hours in some cases, even with new high performance Dell Precision 5820s. I am looking into render farms but the business is keen to keep everything in-house. Has anyone built a render farm? We have enabled swarm but I don't think this is offering much of an advantage due to the fact that all swarm members are usually rendering their own projects all day. We saw great results when only one machine in the swarm was interactively rendering whilst the other inactive swarm PCs contributed to processing, but the team have not noticed a performance increase during normal business usage.

Benjamin

[ivan.slavchev]

Hi,

We have enabled swarm but I don't think this is offering much of an advantage due to the fact that all swarm members are usually rendering their own projects all day. We saw great results when only one machine in the swarm was interactively rendering whilst the other inactive swarm PCs contributed to processing, but the team have not noticed a performance increase during normal business usage.

Hi Benjamin,


SWARM is just a tool that manages a distributed rendering process. If all the machines are rendering already - you won't get any performance benefit since the CPUs/GPUs are busy and there are no resources left to do side jobs. You'll need a separate render nodes (a farm ) with available machines to distribute renders to if you want to have any added benefit.

You can try V-Ray Cloud - https://www.chaosgroup.com/vray/cloud
It has a great intergration with V-Ray and is very fast and easy to use. It's also in Beta 2 stage, so you get 300 credits for free to test.

If you deside on a local render farm you should consider what's your budget for it. The more powerfull the machines are - the better the result (render time) will be. Also - more machines mean more render power. Regarding licensing - you'll need an additional render node license for each additional machine.
Another thing to consider is your workflow. You can dedicate a certain number of machines to each user or the users can share them depending on the tasks - or some combination. If you get a render manager (Deadline for examle) you'll also be able to manage efficiently the render farm, schedule jobs, assign priorities, user permissions etc.

[bpbpbp]

Thanks for the clarification and information Ivan! I will look into Deadline... https://deadline.thinkboxsoftware.com/