DIY Render Farms?

[Will Gibbons]

I'm sure this has come up plenty of times here and know Nils does lots with servers and network rendering. Aside from that, has anyone documented their process or successes with DIY render farms and use with KeyShot here on the forum?

Just curious.

[andy.engelkemier]

I would be extremely interested to know how cost effective it would be since animation is somewhat limited, And they charge you for every node. Not that charging for every node is uncommon, but it's somewhat expensive unless that's your primary business. Keyshot renders are roughly 2 percent of our work....and that's if I'm only counting our designers. I'm excluding engineering and production, who don't use it at all. It's very valuable to be able to quickly kick off a reasonable quality render of what we are working on, but to have dedicated computers and software to render would be too costly for us. I'm interested to know how people are making use of it.

Animation would be a different beast, but in my opinion, an animation is only as good as it's most glaring mistake. Spending time on photorealism while having mechanical looking camera movements in a terrible environment is just a waste of time. If you don't fix the movements, just speed up the renders and skip things like scratches, and subtle bumps that hike your render times up. But at that point, why use keyshot? This is a question I have asked myself for the work we do here. We use keyshot daily for renders, but we use different software for animation that includes rendering on unlimited machines for free. Of course, I've also had to bend Something in every animation I've done, and so far that hasn't been available in keyshot. The way I've heard it described, it's still not ideal in KS6.

I'm just curious to know if other groups are using keyshot for a higher percent of their work, and if a farm is actually cost effective. And also if you've compared it to other options.

[jarane]

It would definitely be interesting to know.
I have 2 macs (12 & 8 core), that I would love to use in tandem for rendering in KS.
E.C.

[Speedster]

I'm interested also.  Considering a BOXX RenderPro (32 cores), but frankly I'm concerned about the ROI in light of the node license expense.
Bill G

[Will Gibbons]

I'm interested also.  Considering a BOXX RenderPro (32 cores), but frankly I'm concerned about the ROI in light of the node license expense.
Bill G

I've been eyeing one myself. Can't justify now, but want to build one of my own :/