Overview: UTSOA Render Farm

Owned by Robert Stepnoski
Last updated: May 02, 2023
2 min read

What does the School of Architecture Render Farm has to offer?

The render farm offers rendering for 3DS Max (Scanline, ART, VUE, VRay, Arnold), Rhino (Rhino Render, VRay), and Blender 3D.

NOTE: The UTSOA Render Farm currently accepts render jobs from 3DS MAX and RHINO versions seen in the SOA Classrooms.

Render Farm Workflow

  • The render farm workflow starts with the original model created by the artist/student on an individual workstation.
  • The model is then submitted through the render farm manager (ie, Royal Render) which then distributes the renderings across the render farm clients (SOA Render Farm).
  • The School of Architecture dedicated render farm consists of 50 systems capable of CPU and GPU rendering.
  • Students can also access the Autodesk 360 Render Cloud, however this option offers less control of the output. You can render directly from Revit, AutoCAD or Fusion 360.

Rendering Types

Rendering is the process of creating either a high resolution image or a series of image file lists that are combined to create an animation.

Distributed rendering is a technique for distributing a single render job within a single frame across many computers in a network. There are different approaches of doing this, but the main concept is to reduce the render times by dividing the rendering and giving multiple workstations different parts of the job. The most common way to do this is to divide the frame to be rendered into small regions (tiles/buckets) and distribute to multiple machines to render a number of them. Using the "Tileframe" feature in the Royal Render Submitter Tool will divvy up your render in as many tiles as you specify up to 30.  This means you can utilize up to 30 Render Farmers at once, reducing your overall render time by 30x.  Then get the results and combine them into the final image or animation.

UTSOA Render Farm Structure

  • Production: 50 High Power Render Farmers CPU/GPU.
  • The Farm can render jobs (scenes) generated in 3DS Max (Scanline, ART, VUE, VRay, Arnold), Rhino (Rhino Render, VRay), and Blender 3D.
  • The Farm is available to help expedite your rendering jobs, and to free up personal or lab computers for other tasks.

Render Farm Setup

  • Workstations
    • Sends scenes to the Render Farm Server
  • Server
    • Handles all render job submissions
    • Works with Mac, Windows & Linux
  • Render Farmers
    • CPU and GPU Rendering 24/7
  • File Server
    • Stores your scene files, images, maps, textures, and animations