Setting Up Render Farm For Blender

Today, I have been learning how to set up a render farm for Blender, combining the resources of my laptop and render farm to speed up rendering tasks. My laptop has an Nvidia RTX 3060 mobile GPU, while the render farm is equipped with multiple GPUs, ranging from RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti to RTX 3080 Ti. Unfortunately, EEVEE can only use a single GPU per Blender instance (in practice, this means two separate computers), which is why I want to use two computers to share resources.

This process involves several key steps to ensure smooth rendering, from configuring shared folders to manually splitting frame ranges for a 1000-frame animation. In this post, I’ll share my experiences and the key phases involved in getting a Blender render farm up and running.

Here are the main phases taken to accomplish the joint rendering:

Setting up a shared folder

• Calculating the ratio for Laptop GPU and Renderfarm GPU (RTX 3060 mobile: 10% of frames, the rest for RTX 3080 Ti render farm)
  • Note: EEVEE can only use one GPU at a time unless running multiple Blender instances

  Manual setup for rendering

  • Open the Blender file on both computers
  • Set frame ranges:
    • For a 1000-frame animation: 0-99 for laptop, 100-1000 for the render farm
  • Save frames as PNGs to the shared folder

  After both Blender instances have finished rendering, use FFMPEG to combine the PNGs into a video.

  Setting up a Blender render farm can seem complex at first, but once you’ve set up your shared folder and properly split the frame ranges between your laptop and render farm, the process becomes much easier.

  In my experience, sharing folders between two Windows machines is not a straightforward process. I’m considering installing Linux on both systems for better performance and simplicity. By leveraging both GPUs, the render time for animations can be reduced—depending on which GPUs you have.