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
Notice: this was rendered in 720p @ Medium quality. You will recognize bad grain especially at the white windows.
@KovJonas Thanks. And thanks for creating the team too! I wasn't sure who created it until I found this forum topic.
I imagine you saw those ominous doors on the first floor? 😛
Just reached five million points! Yahoo! (Unlike the search engine...:D)
It took quite a while to re-find this forum post. The number of forum topics on the Mecabricks forum has substantially increased since I was last on it. 😛
Hello everyone! Some new rules are introduced on Sheepit teams, I'll now share it with you! 😉 Now we finally have a chance to be the 1st team! 😎
*"Hello,
I'm the owner of SheepIt renderfarm.
I'm writing you because you are part of a team on Sheepit.
Today I changed how the team ranking is made, previously it was the absolute amount of point generated by the team who was the base of the ranking but it doesn't fit the render farm anymore.
When the team system was created it had 2 main purposes:
- Add a way to prioritize people you know, like your company or your school
- Create a friendly competition to bring people who might not have rendered frames (or don't even know Blender).
After few years of running, I see some issues with the current system.
The prioritization part is working fine but the 'competition' side is not that great.
The issue is with the german team, which the top team for a long time now. They are too strong 😃
The team maxxed out the 100 user limit and they have been rendering since the beginning. Even if someone is created a new team with 100 friends, it's virtually impossible to beat them now.
Now the team ranking will be done on a 'moving window' based like is done for renderers.
For renderers, it's a 30 days window, for team it's 90 days.
The team capacity was introduced to avoid that everyone is joining a single team. But since SheepIt has grown a lot, I will increase the capacity of team to 200 users.
C."*
Oh, that's awesome! Now we have a chance! 😛
Yahoo! 😄
SheepIt! is not alive once again! Unfortunately, everyone lost a lot of data. I lost half of my points (8.5 mil -> 4.5 mil). Was anyone else affected?
Yes, I lost some 100000 points, not that much...
Does anyone have Discord and willing to share any news about it?
No, I'm not a Discord user... The four million points I lost took close to six months of non-stop rendering to build up, I hope we can all get our points back.
I lost 4 million. Was at 32 mil or so. Now back to 27 mil.
Ouch. I hope they can give us back the points we lost.
I guess I'm lucky, I only lost about 7-8k points, probably those which I gained in the last 2-3 weeks. I have a Discord, and joined their server. Unfortunately the data which they lost in the last couple of days is... simply lost. So we can forgot our points, but at least the site is now back online. 😃 Here is a quote from Discord:
"we had a major harddrive failure and database corruption which has knocked everybody back to August 2018... all points, forum posts, achievements, etc since then are gone
still picking up the pieces"
Unfortunately I think we won't get back any points, since we don't have any proof, that we had "X" points. 😃
Ok that's why we lost so much diffrent points. i haven't been connected for some months, just re-connected a week or two ago, that's why i only lost 100k.
What happened with our Team? Did we loose or gain any place in the toplist? 😃
So we couldn't just ask, "Can I please (very important 😛) have 4 million points since I had 8.5 million points before the server crashed?"?
Let's see...
Nope. Another sad thing for me is that I lost my 2nd place spot on the team... no offense, Sealund? 😉
It seems like we are still on the 19th place. 😉 Samino: you can try to ask them about your points, maybe you get something back!
I mean the team rank list, we're currently 19th now, anyone know where we were before the crash?
I don't care about my rank in our team, I'm just glad I can help you guys to make fantastic renders and animations, wish I had time to make some myself, but they'd probably be to bad to publish... 😉
Yes, we were on the same place I think. 😉 Also fresh news from Twitter:
"Everything should be back to normal.
You should be able to render and add project.
The forum is not back, it will done in the next few days.
Nothing has been decided yet about missing points, our focus was to be back online as soon as possible."
Facebook:
"Everything should be back to normal. If you see something missing let's us know.
You should be able to render and add project.
The forum is not back, it will done in the next few days.
So far the plan is not to give back the missing points because it will be to much time consuming for the moderators and I'm pretty sure it will be abuse. Instead we are thinking about increasing the rendering reward (not sure how much, maybe 3-5time) or maybe an 'event award'.
Nothing has been decided yet, our focus was to be back online as soon as possible."
Well, that's good to hear!
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