With software advancing as quickly as it has, it’s become prohibitively expensive for many students, professionals, and even companies to maintain their own rendering hardware. Not only does it cost money, but it also costs time; rendering a single scene could take hours or even days. For those who want to be able to save money while still producing high quality work, there are render farms.
The Advantages of Using a Render Farm
- Render faster. A render farm can produce still scenes and in motion scenes far faster, to aid with development time. Working with on-premise servers can be frustrating, as it may take a long time to view simple changes.
- Spend less. With a render farm, you pay for only the resources that you need. Comparatively, maintaining your own rendering system means that you’ll need to continually upgrade your hardware, in addition to the initial investment.
- Get better quality. Through advanced render farms, you’re able to achieve best-of-the-best rendering, utilizing all of the resources that are available. There are many advanced quality improvements that would simply be impossible to achieve on limited hardware.
- Scale easily. Render farms let you render any number of items. Depending on your activity, you can render just a few items a month or thousands — and that means that your business will be able to scale without having to pre-invest in costly technology.
- Render remotely. Rather to have direct access to your rendering software, you can simply render your scenes on the cloud — even if you want to work from home, from another office, or from a client site.
- Keep your data secure. With new threats emerging every day, it can be difficult secure a on-premise rendering server. A cloud-based render farm is going to have state of the at security, to protect your organization’s intellectual property and to take the burden off of you.
- Backup your work. Finally, a render farm will also be able to store your media and keep backups of your renders, which can be invaluable in the event of data loss. Render farms can be used to keep project data accessible and to share this data as needed.
The Benefits of Cloud-Based Render Farms
Though render farms have existed for years, cloud-based render farms are now becoming more popular. Cloud-based render farms can be accessed from anywhere, can requisition extremely large amounts of resources, and only charge based on the amount of these resources that you use. Whether you’re an individual building a portfolio or a large enterprise making features, a cloud-based render farm will be just as affordable.
There are many render farms available today but not all of them are made equal. If you’re interested in looking for a render farm, you need to find a render farm that has a good reputation, solid technology, and integrates with the software that you need. Using a render farm is far more effective than trying to process your renders either on your own or through your own business — and it will save you money over time.