DesignByNumbers

If you are a fan of the excellent Open Source 3D modelling and animation package Blender and work somewhere that has a lot of computers sitting idle (overnight for instance), then FarmerJoe is an excellent, free renderfarm solution that’s easy to set up, is reliable, and has a web-based GUI to monitor and schedule jobs.

Based on a set of PERL scripts, binaries are available from the FarmerJoe Website for Windows, Linux and OSX : http://blender.formworks.co.nz/. While you’re there, check out some of the other excellent scripts written for Blender.

The author is not a fan of complicated installations, so he has put a lot of effort into making the setup of his package as simple as possible. The software does not even have to be installed on the slave machines in the renderfarm, instead everything runs from shared executables on the master machine.

Submitting jobs to FarmerJoe is accomplished through a simple Python-scripted interface that runs inside Blender.

Also included is a web-server GUI that allows the user on the master machine to monitor the status of jobs and render slaves, and pause, cancel or reset individual nodes or jobs currently on the renderfarm.

Recently rtraction used FarmerJoe on a HD animation project with a renderfarm of 10 machines. As an example, a single render task of 1600 frames at 1280 x 720, which would have taken over 40 hours on the animator’s workstation alone, was finished in just under one and a half hours on the network.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 3:05 pm and is filed under DesignbyNumbers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.