Building a Render Farm on a Budget – 3DSMAX – Vray

In recent months the compnay I work for has required the need to render animation more often, we have been using vray and 3dsmax, current animation project 3000 frames.

This is in no means a guide to how to build the best render farm, however just a record of how we went about it on a budget.

Shopping/Scavenge List:

Hardware

1x ExServer Cabinet – Loads of power!
5+ Old PC’s with at least 1ghz processor, 512mb ram (as many as you can find)
1x Ethernet Switch (We got a 16 port for £50)
1x KVm Switch Box (Not Essential)
1x Moniter, Keyboard and Mouse

Software

Windows XP Pro
3DSMAX 9 Trial Version
Vray Latest Download
Any Plugins Required
Logmein Free
Logmein Ignition

First off we managed to get hold of an old server cabinet, this was really useful as it had loads of sockets for the pc’s. We then scavenged any old pc’s that were not in use, and stacked them in the cabinet making sure they were all conneted. I then found a kvm switch 2 port which came in handy, to swich between boxes, it would have been better if we could have got hold of one that more but it was just for configuration.

Step 1

Hook Up all pc’s make sure that you have network and IP’s working, and that all pc’s can access a shared volume.

Step 2

Change the Bios so that the PC can boot without the keyboard and mouse

Step 3

Install Software Check O/S, Install Backburner and Vray, shedule Vray spawner and backburner server to start on pc boot up (use the windows task sheduleer)

Step 4

Start the backburner manager and monitor on one of the pc’s.

Step 5

Check that all pc’s are registered with the manager.

Step 6

Run a test job

That’s it for now!

You may want to check out:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1847413,00.asp

It’s all about building a render farm.

Posted by alanson on February 15, 2007 in Uncategorized

  • Anonymous

    hi thank you for the great effort to make things clear abt farms… i want to build my own render farm and i need your help plz…
    im doing my own short film and scene become more nd more heavy . mental ray crash all the time in final render . im using 3ds max . Photoshop and after effects . so im planning to build a workstation first with 2x AMD opteron , 24 gb ddr3 , 2 tb sata , fx 1800 win 7 or xp . the nodes for the farm will be around 6 hp compaq desktop dc 7800 core 2 quad 2.4 , 8gb ram and 500 hard drive (no graphics card no dvd no sound ) i know they will be connected via network cable … so can u explain to me plz how to set them up and what i still need more …

  • Anonymous

    The first thing you need to do is make sure that your network is all setup properly and the computers can communicate with each other.

    You need to make sure you can PING each PC.

    What version of 3DSMAX are you running?

  • Patrick

    Hi! I found your post really interesting, and i would like to know if I should install 3dsMax as a trial for my render node, if i am not using backburner? Those computers will run Max in render mode only… I just wanna know if I have to install my license of 3dsMax that I bought to my render nodes, or should I install the nodes in trial only to prevent license conflict? Because I heard that if i dont need GUI interface to render, i just have to send a command line job of 3dsMax to the render node, and the trial will never “expires”…. Is it true?

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