BlenderCloud is a renderfarm platform for distributed processing of Blender 3D rendering jobs.
This is a perfect solution for Blender artists who don't have own rendering hardware available and don't want to render on their modelling / animation machines. Even if there is some dedicated rendering hardware, it might be important to have access to more computing power when deadlines have to be met.
How it works
With a BlenderCloud account you can request render sessions which consist of a certain number of render nodes and amount of time. With access to the web frontend you get control over the underlying renderfarm.After creating a new rendering job, the requested number of nodes will be spawned and start rendering. When your job is finished, the machines will be shut down and you can download the results.
You can render as many jobs in parallel as you want until the requested amount of time is exhausted. If none of your jobs is running your render session is paused, so you don't loose paid render time.
Benefits
- You don't need to care about own rendering hardware (procurement, maintenance, support).
- You can render your jobs on almost any number of machines in short time.
- You only pay for the rendering time. No extra setup costs.
Unique features
- Simple access via browser, no extra client is required. Control your jobs from everywhere.
- All data transfer and storage is encrypted using open standards.
- Your data is only accessible and used by the renderfarm nodes you control.
System design
BlenderCloud uses a variety of widely known open source software, amongst others: Ubuntu Linux as the operating system for all render nodes, DrQueue for renderfarm job management and Blender for 3D rendering.The flexible AWS virtualization environment was chosen to provide almost any number of render nodes in form of virtual machines (VMs). All VMs are based on a 64 bit architecture.
Each VM runs on Ubuntu Linux 11.10. The installed Blender version is 2.64.
