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Next semester I start my animation courses, and with that, I also start having to sit around waiting for my scenes render. I was thinking today about how studio's have their own render farms most of the time and it made me wonder if it was something I could have too (minus the thousands of dollars in cost). I did a little poking around and I found this cool tutorial that outlined the process. I think I would still need to find something a little more detailed before I attempted something like this myself, but it seems like a really cool idea. I would also need to find a place to put all these computers too, but that's a different story

Anyway, though a few of you might find this useful or interesting. Here's the link: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1815797,00.asp

EDIT: It would be cool to build a bunch of miniATX computers that are about the size of a ps1 and stack them on top of each other and make one big tower like that. It could be portable too depending on how high you want to stack them. Hmmm... ideas!

Sounds like it would get quite hot, still even 5+ miniATX computers are quite expensive, especially if you want them to be good enough to render a complex scene (dual or quad core processor). Then again you could probably get a decent cheap miniATX for £300 over here, so it'll be cheaper in the states.

Wasn't there some sort of research into rendering using the stream processors on nvidia 8 and 9 series cards. That would be far more effective power and cost wise.

Here we go just found the links again http://www.nvidia.com/page/gz_learn.html

If you ever take a crack at this post your results on the forums, it'd be interesting to see your results.

Unless you do not need to use the cores in separated computers. Here is an interesting alternative that was posted at Blendernation.com around one week ago: home-brewed 24 cores render farm. That is very scary.


Cheers.

Was just going to post the same link as 5Louiz, very swish.

NICE Link! Thanks for posting that. Anyone catch how much that render unit cost him? I would like to do what he did, just need an estimate.

EDIT: $3500. A little more than I expected, but after rereading what he packed in there, I'm no longer suprised. He said he can render huge scenes in 10-15 minutes now. Geesh!

Maybe this is something to re look into when I get to the point where I can't wait 3 hours for something to render.

Until then, maybe I'll find some trash computers and rig something together for hobby =]