What render farm software do people use?

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max General
1

I am looking for a local render farm solution, not a cloud-based one.

Backburner is of little use anymore, since it is not 64-bit and cannot take scenes over 2GB or 4GB.

Do people use anything other than Deadline?

One website listed a bunch of software but I haven’t heard of any of them, so please comment if you can:

ButterflyNetRender / Liquid Dream Apps
Qube! PipelineFX
RoyalRender
Smedge
Rush
RenderPal
Afanasy / CGRU
SquidNet
Muster8 Virtual Vertex

Thanks,
Matt

2

You lost me when you said backburner isnt 64bit/unable to take scenes over 2/4gb… That’s not the case.

We use deadline but i’m honestly getting sick of the relentless errors and issues with it. Swapped over 4 months ago but backburner was more stable and has less issues with dropped xrefs.

3

BB might not be able to load 4gb scenes I don’t know, but that’s not a good workflow anyway.
Not only because its more likely to crash and will take quite long pushing the scene through the network to every node.
It’ll also take a lot of disk space on the manager pc’s hdd if you render in multiple passes/different cams.
And last but not least adding scenes to the queue will take ages. Its much better to load the scene via xref scene or vraymeshes into an empty scene.
Do the lighting and render settings there. It’ll be about 2mb big.
Use that scene for publishing render jobs to BB.
The only limit will be the ram on your render nodes.

4

We have 2gb+ scenes and they render fine in Backburner so I don`t know where that info comes from ? I`m sure our network creaks and moans about it but it definitely works for us. Not tried 4gb though.

5

We felt the same some years ago at Brick Visual. We needed something more convenient than Backburner but Dedline was too complicated for Archviz. Therefore we created our own Render Manager. The open beta will be available in May. I hope you will like it :slight_smile: For more info please visit the website: RenderFlow - The Operating System for Your Render Farm or the Facebook page.

6

Backburner is fine, stick to that, less hassle installing plugins etc. It needs a small update as I don’t think it’s change much for over 10 years. Autodesk are very slack here. It has no issues with file size.

Deadline is too complicated for arch viz.