Sheep-It Render Farm Tutorial | Blender 2.8 | Render Fast & Free

if you've ever tried to render out an animation from blender you probably know that it can be extremely time-consuming today in this video I want to show you a way to render out animations using cycles or Eevee extremely fast and free she boot render farm is a free distributed render farm made for blender and the way it works is like this when you're not using your computer you allow other members of the sheep community to use your resources in order to render their animations for doing so you get points you can then go back and use those points to upload your projects to be rendered when you upload a project to sheep it every frame is split up and rendered by different computer simultaneously which is way faster than having to render frames one by one on your own machine before I go any further I want to talk about some of the caveats of sheep it so that no one gets too far then realizes this won't work for them most of the limitations and what you can and can't do it cheap it is listed on their website but there is one thing that I kind of had to search for myself so basically you're going to be distributing either a zip file or a dot blend file with all of your other files in it to a bunch of different computers this means that any assets that you use are accessible by the other machines that are rendering your project so this can mean two things if you are trying to render a project that you want to keep private cheap it's not really gonna work for you because other people can see what's in the project another problem is if you're using assets that you didn't create or that you paid for and don't have the right to redistribute that could technically be breaking copyright laws or license agreements so I would steer clear of doing so I've never tried to open a sheep project that I was rendering myself and I don't know how you would go about doing so but I've read that it can be done and I emailed polygon to ask if I could use their texture assets on sheep it and they basically said no for this reason in my opinion this is probably the biggest caveat of sheep it however if you're making your own assets you're not worried about distributing other people's assets and you don't care if people can see the project that you're working on then this will work great for you one more caveat that I should mention about chipa is that any external scripts that you have so external add-ons will be disabled if you're using something like say Pro lighting skies that's gonna end up being disabled so keep that in mind before trying to up your projects to ship it so without further ado let's get into the tutorial so the first thing you're gonna want to do is go to ship it - render farm comm I'll put a link to that in the description and then you're going to want to create an account now I created my account a while ago but I remember having to upload a profile picture before I could send any projects so be sure to do that next you're gonna want to go to the get started tab and right here you're gonna want to select your operating system and begin downloading the sheep it executable this is the piece of software you'll run when you're not at your computer or when you're willing to give up your resources to gain points so once that's downloaded you're gonna open it and what you'll see is this but it won't be in full screen right here is the authentication part where you put in your username and password that you just created you can set the theme the working directory I'm pretty sure is where all the temporary files get saved I usually just leave that as is and then right here in compute devices you can set it to use your CPU your GPU or both and you can set the amount of cores the amount of memory and the priority for this I usually just leave it on GPU and I leave these at max because I usually run this at night when I'm not using my computer so once everything here is filled out you can hit start and the first thing that it's going to do is it's going to download a test file to see if your computer is powerful enough to even render a project in blender up here you can see information about the project right here you can see different global stats and you can see your points right here as well and down here you can see the amount of points you've earned this session the amount of frames you've rendered and so forth right here it'll show you a picture of the frame that you previously rendered and uploaded so really all there is to do here is just wait and let your computer do its thing while gaining points when you have enough points or when you want to use your computer again you can hit exit and you can exit immediately or finish the current frame that you're on I like to finish the current frame just because if it were me I would like for whoever's rendering my frame to finish so now we're gonna move on to preparing your project and uploading it to shape it to render your own animations alright so here we are inside a blender and this is a very basic scene that I put together for the sake of demonstration it's just a very basic bedroom with a camera zoom animation I don't have any textures on anything except for the default materials on the arkham mesh stuff and I do have an HDR in the scene from hgri Haven and there are a few things that we have to do to make sure this is gonna work right so first off this isn't this doesn't apply to my scene and particularly but if you have any animate or I'm sorry any physics simulations that aren't baked you have to bake them you can't run physics simulations in a project that you upload to seep it they'll come back in absolute mess because again the project gets split up amongst a bunch of different computers and they can't run that way so the next thing is you need to make sure that your paths to external data are relative now what that means is let's say for example I had a texture on this bed frame or even better yet I'm using an HDR from HDR I even if I pull the folder that might blend files in over here that HDR is right here and it's being referenced relatively so blender is able to see this if I were to move this whole folder somewhere and then open this top blend file there would be no problem because blender knows just to grab this file it's not looking for a specific path somewhere on my computer so say for example you had texture files in a completely different folder somewhere on the computer blender needs to be able to look in that exact location for that exact texture file in order to open it and so if you try to upload it to sheep it that way you're just gonna get a magenta mess back because it's not gonna be able to find any of your texture files and the way that you can go about fixing this is by going up to file external data and make all paths relative now for me it says one failed and I think that one is a texture that was originally on this bed frame that I removed and tried to purge from the file but for some reason it just won't go away from me I'm not really sure why but if you do see that files are failing I would suggest testing and a way that you can test is by just making a folder somewhere on your desktop and taking everything from inside your blend folder and putting it in that folder on your desktop and then trying to run it from the folder on your desktop and seeing of everything loads properly if it does you'll probably be in good shape so next you're going to decide whether or not you want to upload a zip file containing your entire project or a dot blend file and if you want to upload just a dot blend file you have to go to file extra and pack all and adopt blend usually this works for me sometimes I've seen that it hasn't and it will leave texture files out for some reason in which case you're going to want to zip up your project and do it that way but if you have no errors there and you'll be able to see later on on cheap if you're missing any files then that way will work fine too so next what you're gonna want to do is set your render settings over here so however many samples you want set it here any light path settings any of this stuff you're gonna want to set that's gonna all be taken into account when you upload it into sheep it and also your output settings now the max resolution is 18 thousand by 18 thousand but I doubt you would ever even need to render something that big but just in case you were wondering your frames start and end you're gonna want to set here so mine's 60 frames at 24 frames per second I like to set this path to slash slash stamp it's just a relative path to a temp folder and it seems to work for me and for the file format it has to be an image it has to be a PNG or a JPEG you can get an mp4 from sheep it one project is done rendering later on if you want you can also get the individual frames and then put them into your video editing software of choice but just make sure that this is set to an image of some sort and also of course your render engine whether or not you're using cycles or evey so once you're happy with all of your settings we're gonna go back over to sheep it and we're gonna prepare to upload this file so on CP you're gonna go back to that get started tab you're gonna scroll down here and you're going to see the upload section now I would look over here before uploading because a lot of the stuff I mentioned and more about what will and won't work etc is over here and it will also show you how far you are in line in the waiting list and this will be based on how many points you have so the more points you have the longer it take I'm sorry the more points you have the less time you'll be waiting in line to be rendered and I find that waiting in line for your render to start is the longest part of this process because once it starts it's usually fairly quickly that your projects done so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna choose my blend file because I packed it into the dot blend hit OK and open and you can see the max file size is 500 megabytes which is one reason why you might want to go to zip file if your files too big I'm gonna go ahead and send this file all right and you can see here it's showing that I'm missing a texture file and it's that weird texture file that I mentioned earlier that won't purge from my project and that's fine if you're seeing a bunch of files missing here you may want to test your project the way I mentioned earlier to make sure that everything's set to relative data otherwise let's take a look at some of these settings up here so this is where you can tell it to give you an mp4 video if you want you can specify what you want your project to be rendered with CPU and NVIDIA GPU AMD GPU I'll just check these all on for now type animation and then your start frame and your end frame and your steps so for me it's one sixty and one and then there's a tile splitting feature here and we'll talk about that in just a minute but if I click Add this blonde file what's gonna happen is you can see right here your blend file has been detected it's too heavy because it's over this many million pixel samples per frame and basically it my file is just too heavy it takes too long to render a single frame and most people don't want to spend all their time rendering one frame because I'm pretty sure points are distributed based on how many frames you render I don't fully understand the math behind how they distribute points it's on their website and I'll link it in the description but they tend to block heavy projects and there's a couple of ways you can go about fixing this so it says here the first way is you can open the cheap it executable and if you have a project uploaded and you run the she Pat executable you'll start rendering you're rendering your own project automatically and if you manage to render one frame in a reasonable time it'll unblock your project but if you know that your project is pretty heavy so in my case if I go render render image on an RT X 2070 it's gonna take about 40 minutes which is pretty long for a single frame the chances are if this gets unblocked other members of the community may just block it from rendering on their machine and then your project will never get rendered and I've had this problem a few times so you may want to go with one of the other options mmm so one of those includes just basic techniques for decreasing render times in general like messing with your light bounces clamping caustics all of that stuff so we can disable caustics on this scene for example and you could also bake textures things like that but that of course comes at the expense of realism so another thing that you can do is what's called frame splitting so if we just go back so first what we're gonna do I'm gonna go in and I'm going to cancel these projects and you can do that by just going to your profile it'll show your active projects and then right here there's the remove button and then I'm gonna go back to get started and I'm gonna choose my file again real quick now we can use this calculator down here to figure out how we should split our frames and what frame splitting is is essentially instead of one computer rendering one frame it'll render part of a frame and then later on before your frames are given back to you they get masked back together so you just got whole frames of course and this will make it so that each person rendering isn't spending a whole lot of time rendering part of your project at least that's what I'm like 90% positive is what's happening based on my own observations I haven't read all of the documentation about this but that's what it appears is what's happening when I render my own project and based on the way that it's described so once you know how long it'll take to render a frame you can come down here to the estimator and what you can do is you can put in that amount of time that you got so 45 minutes in my case the number of frames that your projects gonna be so 60 in my case and then your processor or GPU name depending on how you got this number what you were rendering with so in my case and r-tx 2070 and there it is right there and then you can click OK and you'll see some information here such as how much the project will cost you and right here it'll show you how each split amount will affect render time so if I split into sixteenths it'll be about 20 minutes and 27 seconds so that's what I'll go with for this project something I want to point out is sometimes this estimator just doesn't work for me I'm not entirely sure why for example there were a few times where I tried to put in this exact same information and it was showing me that my project was only gonna cost 32 points and there was no splitting necessary I'll put a picture of that on the screen I don't know why this happens if anyone knows please please let me know in the comments down below now one last thing when it comes to frame splitting one big caveat is that because the frames of course are getting split into chunks you can't use denoising now I know that this scene will be particularly noisy and so that's kind of a problem but something that I've noticed and this is just a solution that I use and I don't know if it's the best method or not but if you crank the samples up if your frame splitting it usually ends up working so I'm gonna put my render samples to about 8,000 I'm gonna save this I'm gonna go file external data back all on the top blend go to see pit choose file choose my file send this file okay and I'm gonna split by 16 tiles again that's the number that that calculator on the other page gave to me originally and so it's what I'm gonna go with I'm gonna click add this blend file and you can see it's been added mmm we're not getting that error message that we got before and if you click on administration you can see your project right here it's waiting once frames start rendering they'll turn this color and you'll be able to see their progress and when they're finished you'll of course be able to look at them by clicking clicking on these little squares and there are 60 of these little squares of course because there's 60 frames and that is pretty much all there is to it once you're done you'll be notified by email and you'll be able to come here and get your frames you can either get your individual frames they'll be zipped up or you can get that dot mp4 if you enabled that option and you can also enable that option right here on this page if you forgot to do it before so now there's really nothing left to do but wait most of the time spent is waiting online and it depends on how many points you have so if you have a lot of points and you're high up in line it really shouldn't take too long but either way it's way fat it'll be way faster than if you were to render with your own computer like I said this would take me I keep doing that but I mean to go up here render image at the settings that I changed it to this would take me about an hour and 13 minutes per frame which means at 60 frames that's over 60 hours of rendering so even if this even if sheep it were to take all day on this which I know it won't that's still more worth it than trying to render it from my own machine so now we'll wait and we'll come back when it's finished alright so if you go to your account by clicking on your profile image and going to my account you can come over here to latest projects and you can see this is rendered and this was actually a previous render I did before this tutorial just for the sake of time and making sure that my settings would work it was all the same settings that I used in this tutorial but here we have all these finished frames which of course you can go and you can look at you can see who they were rendered by and how they were rendered and you can go back and you can download your frames and you can also download your video and that's really all there is to this tutorial here's the finished product that I got again the scenes very simple everything and it's modeled very quickly and you can see some clipping on the windows but that's not really what the tutorials about anyways it's just about rendering and animation fast so if you enjoyed this please consider slapping a like on it if you have any questions comments or concerns please leave them in the comments down below and I will see you in the next video a quick message to all my viewers and subscribers thank you so much for all the views and comments on my previous videos I really did not expect them to get nearly as many views as they did I just kind of uploaded them thinking maybe a few people would get help out of them but they got a lot more views than I expected and a lot of people have been asking me when I'm gonna upload again I know it's been quite some time and I apologize for that and it's for two reasons really the first reason is I'm a full-time student in college right now I'm at the end of my degree program and it's gotten pretty hectic for me and the other reason is I don't want to just upload videos of a topic that's been done many many times by other channels I just feel as though it's not really worth anybody's time to watch like for example I've thought about uploading a Bunder beginner tutorial series and if that's something you really want to see for me let me know but way bigger channels have done a magnificent job at doing so like blender guru for example has two blender beginner tutorial series now and they're both really good and I don't know that I'd be able to offer anything better if I were to upload my own and I just want to give content that again is worth watching and it takes time to come up with things that haven't been covered to death on YouTube so I've been kind of taking my time trying to come up with topics that I just think are worth everybody's time but anyways again thank you so much for all the views I will be trying to upload as much as I can as ideas come to me and as I get free time in the future so if you want to see future videos from me please consider subscribing and I'll see you then

Channel: Tyler Serino

Views: 36,775

Keywords: 3d, 3d animation, animation, anything, b3d, blender, blender 3d, blender 3d animation, blender animation, blender render, blender render farm, blender tutorial, cycles, fast rendering, faster, free, free render farm, free renderfarm, graphics, how to, modeling, render, render farm, render farm blender, render online, render service, renderfarm, render-farm, rendering, sheepit, sheep-it, sheepit render farm, tutorial, what is a render farm, blender render animation, render animation blender

Id: kFJFMs_CgYo

Length: 19min 25sec (1165 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020