Reply To: Omar Domenech’s Demo Reel
SheepIt Render Farm Report!
I’ve spent about a week feeling out SheepIt and my opinion is: We should try it for one of your scenes @dostovel.
I really think it will be a cleaner, more automated option with far less risk for accidents: No one’s storage is eaten up, no syncing of files, no potential for accidental file deletion, no duplication of frames.
My experience:
While money isn’t valid SheepIt currency, the system is moderated by points. Everyone earns points by rendering other people’s projects and they lose points by getting their own projects rendered. More points means higher priority for getting your own projects rendered.
So there’s incentive to gain and maintain points. I submitted a single-frame project (split into 32 tiles) when I had about 60-70K points and it waited 2-3 hours in the queue before it started to render. Today I submitted a 200-frame animation when I had about 280K points and it started and finished rendering within an hour. Linux Luke would have taken 6+ hours! Check out how many people were rendering my scene at the beginning: (spoiler: 60 people!)
That makes me think points are very important for prioritizing your renders. Therefore if I’m going to get good, reliable use out of SheepIt, I need to regularly render for others. I plan to build up points by rendering 1 or 2 nights per week.
The more I use it the more I think the system is ingenious. Frankly I’m amazed that more people aren’t using it. Typically I’ve seen between 400-500 computers connected for rendering. Out of all the Blender users out there wanting/needing renders without spending money…that’s crazy to me. The number should be in the thousands.
The biggest caveat is that no one can harness the full potential of SheepIt right away. As far as I can tell you must build up significant points or the system is going to be underwhelming.
Team Rendering:
I haven’t tested this but it looks like we (people in this thread) could use SheepIt to render scenes “privately” between our computers. Like we’re doing with Google Drive but with the automated SheepIt system:
This way we could setup a “CG Cookie Team” where members could join SheepIt and anytime a member has a project that needs rendering, the CGC sheepit team gangs up on the frames for rendering. If we all got in the habit of loading the sheepit desktop applet regularly / periodically it would even happen automatically.
Omar, what do you say we try this for you next scene?