First time render farm

As we all know, rendering sucks. The process is lengthy and laborious and usually involves you staring at render buckets filling up slowly, and trying to use a Jedi mind-trick to make it go faster. Unless you’re blessed to work in an animation studio with enough processors to power a small country, you’re more than likely going to have to one day use a render farm.

A render farm, for those who don’t know, is a collection of computers built to render computer-generated imagery (CGI), typically for film and television visual effects. It distributes your frames across the group of computers and thus renders complete frames in a fraction of the time, allowing you to carry on with other things.

I was faced with a project which required much more capacity than what I had available and needed an online rendering solution to do the heavy-lifting for me. Introducing RENDERFEED.

Renderfeed is a great online solution to quickly complete Cinema 4D R12 and R13 renders. They’re wide range of packages allowed me to sign up for a day at a time when needed and having not used a render farm before, I found the entire process quite easy to manage.

Things I found useful:

• Having the option to zip my files before uploading and extracting the zip online
• Being able to upload all files prior to my subscription beginning, thus maximizing render time
• Having an option of managing my render online or through the Renderfeed Cinema 4D plugin
• The Renderfeed Cinema 4D plugin allowed me to automatically download frames as they completed, which eliminated another step out of the rendering process
• The support team were great in solving any first-time issues

Things to remember when using a render farm:

• Collect your project files | Use Cinema 4D’s “Save Project” feature to collect all your assets into one folder
• Check all texture paths that they are pointing to the “tex” sub-folder
• All X-Refs must be in the same folder as your main file, and all paths inside Cinema 4D must be relevantly set
• Calculate your render time | The last thing you want is to only book a day and find out your render did not complete

Obviously there are other players in render farmville, but in terms of a solution for Cinema 4D, I found Renderfeed to be the cream of the crop.

Be sure to check their site out www.renderfeed.com to see how best they can help you!

Should you have any questions or comments with regard this, please don’t hesitate to contact me.