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Build Your Own Render Farm
Another installment of Tom's Hardware's how-to articles has a look at what it might take to build your own render farm. The article looks at everything from top-to-bottom roll-your-owns to buying things pre-built and the pricing insanity that goes along with it. "If you are working as a freelance artist in the above-mentioned media, toying with the idea, or doing so as a hobbyist, then building even a small farm will greatly increase your productivity compared to working on a single workstation. Studios can even use this piece as a reference for building new render farms, as we're going to address scaling, power, and cooling issues. If you're looking at buying a new machine and are thinking of spending big bucks to get a bleeding-edge system, you might want to step back and consider whether it would be more effective to buy the latest and greatest workstation or to spend less by investing in a few additional systems to be used as dedicated render nodes."
... or to spend less by investing in a few additional systems to be used as dedicated render nodes.
Especially if you buy used systems. Computer hardware depreciates fast.
Even a single render node dramatically increases productivity for me.
I'm doing TG2 skybox renders, something that easily takes 12 hours each, and often two, three, four times that. Having a few render nodes (two at the moment) means I can continue working while a few frames are already rendering. That means more of my time is spent productive and less is spent waiting.
My render nodes aren't even dedicated machines, just other machines I have around that are mostly idle.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Is this astroturfing? Their website implies that they can streamline frame rendering down by several orders of magnitude, but there's no indication about how. Their FAQ is content-free, using buzzword-laden statements like " . . . gives non-linear access to lighting, ambient occlusion, materials . . . ." What is "non-linear" supposed to mean here?
There's always going to be a place for a render farm. Even if 3D modelers tomorrow can work in real time with settings that would take hours to render today, that'll just mean that the render farm will be running with even higher settings that might not exist today. At some point, we'll be able to run a render farm doing ray tracing with hundreds of reflections and get realistic skin pores and wood grain out of the technique, but the modeler is only going to be working with 20 or so.
Not a typewriter
A total of 10 copies of XP (for 10 nodes) may sound like a big expense, but it actually adds $140 per unit, pushing the cost of these machines to about $485 per unit for a dual-core node or $610 per unit for a quad-core configuration.
I think Tom should have rephrased that to put it into perspective: "Don't worry only 20% of the node cost is from Windows". I find it amazing that the most expensive component on the cheaper node is Windows XP and on the beefier node, it's nearly the same price as the CPU. It's even more baffling that this statement appears on the same page in reference to CPU selection:
It's really all about how much you want to spend here, because this is the single most expensive component required for each node.
Maybe Tom is a secret Linux fan and is hinting that Windows isn't a component but a tax. Or maybe he's just really bad at math.