Blender – Flamenco – Timings and results

Yay, after all these years I finally have a working render farm!  So here is my setup:

rendernavi:

This is the main computer I built for rendering that I assembled in August of 2014:

Linux Mint 17

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz

32 GB DDR3

OCZ 200GB SSD

Asus Nvidia GTX 780 6GB

03la-smiller:

A boring name, but it’s my work laptop, so I don’t have a choice in the name.  Anyway:

OS X Yosemite 10.10.5

Mac Book Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Early 2013)

2.4GHz Intel Core i7

Memory 8GB 1600 MHz DDR3

SSD Drive

NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1GB

The interesting thing to note here, I’m not sure if this computer is using CPU or GPU rendering with Flamenco.  Typically GPU rendering on here has crashed the entire computer here, but that hasn’t happened currently.  CPU rendering has always been stable.

musicnavi:

This was a budget Windows computer that I built:

Microsoft Windows 10 (upgraded from Windows 7)

Intel Core i3

8 GB RAM (DDR3 I think)

SSD Drive

NVIDIA Geforce GTS 8600 (which means I’m using CPU rendering, this is too old for modern GPU rendering).

Ok, so how long does it take?  So here are the stats of the scene that I have been rendering:

240 frames @ 24 Frames Per Second -> 10 second video

780p resolution (1280 x 720) at 100%

100 samples (Thus we are using Cycles)

So let’s compare:

Rendering all of the frames with Flamenco took 20 minutes.  For total time you have to add in the extra steps of taking the images and putting them into the Video Sequence Editor…etc.

So let’s compare how many chunks each computer was able to do:

We have a total of 48 chunks (a chunk is 5 frames).

rendernavi rendered: 28 chunks

03la-smiller rendered:  15 chunks

musicnavi rendered:  5 chunks

ok, great!  So now the question that is burning inside of me, how long would this take to render if I did this same render on just rendernavi?  Let’s find out:

rendernavi time:  26 minutes

Flamenco farm time:  20 minutes

So indeed we are rendering faster on the farm!  YAY!  Now from above, rendernavi still did a majority of the work on the farm because it’s the most powerful system that I have.  However I always told myself, If I can get a render farm working, then I can justify buying new video cards.  Off to the computer store!

And for finality, here is the actual render that was done on the Flamenco farm:

Animation rendered on Flamenco Render Farm

(Although I’m not liking what youtube is doing to the quality of the video, even when I change it to 720p).  Maybe it’s just because I just uploaded it, or maybe they are doing something to reduce the quality, anyway, that’s another issue for another time.

It took a week of complete dedication, but now I finally have a render farm!  I hope these Pages have been helpful to anyone who is trying to setup Flamenco.

–Shaun