Render Farm
The render farm at the University of Michigan 3D Lab helps streamline the rendering of high quality animations. By spreading the processing workload over many different PC's, the render farm dramatically decreases the amount of time required to render lengthy or high resolution animations.

Description

A render farm is a group of computers connected via local networking to coordinate the rendering of the many frames which make up an animation. The individual frames are afterwards composited together to form a seamless animation. By initially rendering to frames instead of straight to an animation, the user may experiment with different resolutions and formats, or create multiple versions for different purposes. Also, if there is an error during part of the animation, a group of frames may be re-rendered and corrected without needing to do the whole job over.

The render farm cannot be used to render directly to an animated format.
 
  
Specifications
   
   
 
  
Usage
Those interested in using the render farm for their next project must request disk space on our server, since all rendered output will be stored on our local network. The user must then move all necessary files to her allocated space, including textures, sounds, and scene files. As mentioned above, animations must be rendered to still images, and not to animated formats.

We are currently upgrading our render farm software and streamlining this process.
 
  
Gallery
Michigan Stadium
Garage
Earth
Dark and Scary Staircase
Copyright 2008 ©, the Regents of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA