Working with the SheepIt Render Farm

Working with the SheepIt Render farm.docx

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As with many people, over the course of quarantine, I picked up new hobbies. I did not have a lot of my own money to invest in anything too substantial, so most of the things I tried were through my computer. By far one of the most interesting of them all was 3D modelling with Blender. While I had already been familiar with CAD for engineering purposes, Blender gave me the perfect environment to develop my more creative tendencies. Blender comes with two render engines, Eevee, a very fast but poor engine, and Cycles, the slower but more realistic one. With my potato of a computer, all my projects could ever use was Eevee. Yet, I longed for more advanced work. That was when I stumbled across https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/. The SheepIt render farm is a free, community-maintained, render farm for crowdsourcing the computational effort of more complex blender projects. The only catch is that you need to put in as much render hours as you take out. Regardless of computer capability, all I need to do to participate in the farm for 5 hours of effort, is to leave my computer rendering another person’s project for 5 hours. This opened up a whole new world of projects for me, that I am still currently exploring. One of my personal “hacks” to rack up hours on the farm, was to leave the school engineering computers running throughout the schooldays, every day, for two weeks. With multiple PC’s backing my effort, this summer I have more computational hours than I can dream of. To stress-test the farm on my first effort, I made an intentionally poor optimized, spinning black hole render, with multiple layers of procedural noise, and dynamic ray tracing. A project that would have taken my computer two weeks straight of rendering (if it would even survive the task), took the farm two measly hours. SheepIt opened a whole new world of art to me that I would never have been able to touch otherwise. For anyone looking to delve more into the art of 3D realism, or gain access to more detailed work, I would highly recommend SheepIt.

If you’re interested in checking out the render I referenced in this post, you can view it here, and download the project files here.