Quote from MC_Crinkle on 2013/02/17, 06:47

Hi guys,

MC_Crinkle here again! I'm hard at work getting all these awesome blender renders done for the server, I just have one really REALLY big enemy at the moment, and that is the speed of my computer! So I thought, why not get the community to help me? Basically I need to do the equivalent of borrowing your computer at idle moments. I have all these scenes that area ready and just need to actually be rendered, but it takes a long time, or a lot of CPU power.

To put this in perspective for you, i have an AMD 6-core 1055T processor overclocked to 3.1Ghz per core (18.6Ghz total power). Some scenes take only a minute or so to render, and I can set it going, go to sleep, come back the next morning and its done, or nearly done. But others are more complex and can take upwards of 15 minutes per frame. And in a 500 frame animation, that takes a hella long time to render! If anyone wants to see a finished product before christmas, I'm probably going to need some help!

How it'd work is, you install blender on your computer, I send/email you over the blender file, and you just get your computer to render the images, and then zip them up (it wont save space but it'd easier to manage as one archive rather than 500 images). And upload them to a specific place. Then i download them and add them to the finished project. Of course, you will be credited as render farmers extraordinaires!

Anyone who is interested, it'd be great if you could fulfill these requirements:

Have a multi-core (ideally 4 cores or more) processor.
Have at least 8GB of ram, more would be even better.
Have internet that isnt likely to crap out half way through a large upload (and good upload speed of course).
Be able to leave it running on your computer for a large amount of time (overnight/or over a few nights/or over a few days).

During the render times your computer may respond very sluggishly or not at all. It CAN be run in the background if you reduce the numbers of cores, but then of course, will take a lot longer. Video card doesnt need to be great, in fact i dont think blender uses it much!

You dont need any blender experience to help out, I can easy make a quick YT video which shows you all you have to do. Essentially, its a case of opening the file, and leaving it to render.

Any help would be much appreciated to move this along faster! Please post below if you'd like to help, and include your processor type and speed, your memory amount, and how much time you think you'd be able to leave it going for.

And if anyone knows a good place where people can upload large files (like up to about 2gb) for free and others download at a nice speed, that would be really helpful!

Thanks for reading!