How to Build Your Own Render Farm Set Up

Setting up a basic render farm is quite easy if you have some basic knowledge about programming. Here I will take you through some basic steps on how to set up a 3ds max 5 or 3ds max 4 network rendering farm. Keep in mind that there are several assumptions that I will make in this guideline. First and foremost ensure that you have a fully operational network that can access the other machines using it. If you are not certain about the network connectivity with the rest of the machines, use the PING tests each computer. When you are through, you should be able to know whether the computers are well connected or not.

The components that you will need for a render farm set up are a work station. This is the master computer that you will use for lightening, modeling and texturing animation and the location of the 3d max license is found. You can also convert the work station into a rendering station at times when there is a lot of work load to increase productivity. Another component that you will need in the render farm set up is the manager, this is the machine where 3ds max software will be installed and work as a render manager. It will serve the purpose of controlling the rendering activity of the network rendering machines (servers). There is normally a limit for the number of network connections that can be maintained by the manager. It is advisable to use windows workstation that can have up to ten connections at ago.

Plug-in library will be required for third party for storage of texture maps and fonts. 3ds max does not necessarily have to be installed in the machine but in this case we will assume that there is a shared folder that has sub folders of 3ds max copied from the work station. What you do is share the folders in this computer with the servers which are used to render only. However these servers do not need to have the original copies of 3ds max because they are not for manual launching.

You will need to edit 3ds max with the plug-in and server computers and then ensure that any changes you make in the work station are done in all the other servers so as to reduce inconsistencies. Render farm Mac network is a media access control address that is used in network interfaces to uniquely identify communications on the physical network. They are network addresses for network technologies such as Ethernet that mostly use IEEE802. Render farm Mac addresses are normally assigned by the manufacturer of an NIC and is stored in the hardware. You can install rendering set up on a Mac address for your computer. If you are using Auto desk soft wares such as sketch up, auto CAD, 3ds max, it is very important that you have them installed with rendering service. For this purpose the best laptop that can be used for render farm Mac is the Mac Book pros.