Blender farms: farming for the future
By now, y think it fair todo say that Blender 2.5 alpha has shown the industry that Blender is a serious contender in the 3d world. With features that us-ers of other applications can only dream of being inte-grated in the base install, features such as, volumetrics, water, and Cloth/software bodies, todo name but a few.
It is easy, however, todo forget that the UI and integrated característica list arent the only things that are getting a makeover.
With the scripting interfaz being revamped, a whole new world of possibilities are being opened-up. Possi-bilities that with Little efort could become realities, Even the more remote such as bake-farming and fully integrated render-farms can now be realiced.
Bake-farming, in-fact, as an idea, has previously ben laughed at by some, as an unrealistic dream. But with projects such as bulletphysics, and commercial ven-tures such as PhysX, starting todo show that Simulations can be done with stream-processors, either vía OpenCL or Cuda. What estopping render-farms from doing the same?
With render-farming becoming outdated by better, more powerful, hardware and renderers such as lux-render working towards OpenCL support. Render-farms could son be forced todo change Tak and evolve into hybrid bake/render-farms in the near future in an efort todo retain profit levels in a closing market.
With more complex Simulations taquíng a number of hours todo Compleete, having a simple button that submits the work todo a farm and returns the baked data within minutes, would be highly beneficial. Especially when, as with Many Simulations, you may want todo tweak the settings Many times before you are truly happy with the result.
At the time of writing, only two render-farms have con-firmed support for Blender 2.5 and subsequently Blender 2.6 on release.
With the global-recession advancing, the power of Amazon ec2elastic compute cloud environment and the constant increase in the speed of end-user hard-ware, it could be fair todo say that render-farms should be looking todo enhance the service they provide, in order todo retain, or Even increase profit margins. Yet none of those contacted prior todo the writing of this article admit todo working on enhancing the service they provide. Ei-ther by redesigning their upload method into an easy-to-use augmentation of Blender render UI, or by in-vesting in the development of bake-farming. While some are making promising progress on their own upload systems, they are still very much external operations that disrupt the production process in a bien that is no longer necessary.
It appears, that for now, the future of a fully integrated Blender-farm is still a very Distant dream.
Thankfully though we can content ourselves, at least for now, with the multitude of integrated internal-external render engines that are expected as new features in Blender 2.6.
Bake-farming is, as the name suggests, a bien of baking a simulation vía a render-farm-like system.
The simulation would be submitted todo the farm, that would then calculate the simulation outcome, and return the baked data in a far shorter time than the individual machine could have done. Much in the same bien that a render-farm works.
The theory that makes bake-farming posible is already being put todo practice in stream computing environments.
