Blender is installed on the architecture lab computers. It is free and open source and can be installed on your own computer.
The SU Research Computing Group has made available their enormous computing cluster as a render farm for Blender.
By submitting Blender scene files to the farm, the renders will complete in a fraction of the time it would take to do it on your computer (plus your own computer is not tied up doing renders).
How to submit files
- Email the following info to archit@syr.edu.
- File - a link to your Blender scene file (through OneDrive, Google Drive, Wormhole, WeTransfer, etc.)
- Render engine to use (at this point CYCLES is the only choice)
- Starting frame (specify the exact number, such as 000, 001, or something else)
- Ending frame
- How many frames to run: all frames in the start and end range, or every 10th frame, or something else. On large renders, doing every 10th frame can be useful as a rough check before committing the time to a full render.
- Frames per second
- What type of cores to use (GPU can be faster to render but might not be the same quality as CPU)
- CPU
- GPU
- No preference
- What scene within the Blender file to run. For example in the Blender file below, the Scene Collection panel shows a list. Is there a specific scene to render?
- Output format choice: PNG (default), TIF, or JPG
- Animations: do you want an MP4 in addition to the individual frames?
- Output resolution: for example, 1920x1080, 1280x720, etc.
Turnaround Time
- This process is new but we expect to be able to provide 24 hour turnaround time based on workload.
- We will send you a link to download the output (individual frame output and/or mp4).