Hello,

I did an intense test of a nice and free distributed rendering service for BLENDER called 'Sheep It!'
https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com

I recommend that everyone of us might use it and keep your PCs online for collecting Render Credits and rendering your animations of course. 😃 It's pretty simple. You even don't need to have installed BLENDER. Just download the client and start it (check the instuctions).

WHAT IS DISTRIBUTED RENDERING
Your animation will be split on available computers of other Sheep It! members. So called 'render clients'.

HOW DOES THIS NEAT SERVICE WORK?
You save your BLENDER scene with relative paths for textures as a packed file and upload it via your account. Then it will be queued and you have to wait. In the beginning it starts slow but more and more clients of othe users will start to render frames. An animation what would usually take a couple of days on your computer will be rendered in a couple of hours. When the rendering is finished you will be informed by e-mail and you can download a ZIP.

LIMITATIONS
500mb per BLENDER pack. And you have to take care that your pictures will not render much longer than 20 minutes on a quad core machine. If so you can select a tiling option what will split the pictures into 4 tiles but you will receive a single picture. I ran into this situation. It's not hard to do LEGO animations rendering an hour per frame in HD. So lower the picture size to 1290 x 720 (720p) or try the tiling option. The problem is that Sheep It! will block you for the community for this renderjob if it realizes that most of your pictures render too long. You can finish that job with your client(s) of course but that's not the idea.

CONCLUSION
it needs some testing to get a feeling how far you can go but it's a great opportunity to get massive extra renderpower you usually can't afford.

EXAMPLE
Fortunately I am a 3d pinoneer from end of the 80th. Unfortunately I am running an animation studio what pushs me away from the fun stuff. Fortunately I am back to some fun stuff because of digital LEGO but I feel rusty. Unfortunately I am not familiar with BLENDER and when I look back 30 years of dealing with many applications without reading the fucking manual I never experienced a piece of software hard and drustrating to understand like BLENDER. The GUI is annoying. But it's free and the potential is amazing. My bittervet tears are tasty. I know. I could import a BLENDER scene into MODO to create a fast and simple camera animation over 800 frames for a nice test. The Z-up crap of BLENDER gave me a headache and I did not find a clean workflow yet to import animation data correctly into BLENDER. The following example to show the power and possibilies with Sheep It! was unfortunately broken at the end of the animation. There's an issue with the plotted camera animation. I had to cut the movie at frame 710. But for a first dirty test it's amazing because:

Cumulated time of render: 6d08h18m
Real duration of render: 6h22m

https://vimeo.com/158908921

Notice: this was rendered in 720p @ Medium quality. You will recognize bad grain especially at the white windows.