hello everyone marco here from
garagefarm.net
and today i'll be introducing you to a
new feature we've added to the farm for
blender users
which is the ability to render a still
image over multiple nodes
we achieve this by segmenting an image
into a number of strips as we call them
so that each strip renders a fraction of
that image on its own node
that means that if you uh had like a 4k
image for example you could render that
image over four notes at a thousand by a
thousand pixels
at the same time
which means you render that image at
around a quarter of the time it would
otherwise take
so let's have a quick look at the scene
we'll be rendering today it's a simple
portrait and i've set the resolution to
a ridiculous twenty thousand by thirty
thousand pixels
and i'm not sure that anyone would
normally wanna do that but we wanted to
illustrate that you could send an image
at any resolution to the farm and render
it this way
also at this resolute resolution we'll
be getting a lot of detail from the
image
which we'll have a look at later
if you haven't used the farm before
you'll need to create an account from
your web dashboard and download our
render beamer plugin and have it running
before launching blender you can find
all available plugins from within render
beamer and install what you need
so you'll see that
i have blender installed you'll then
have to activate the render beamer
add-on from your preferences in blender
simply
search render beamer at the search
filter on the add-on tab and you should
find it
don't be alarmed when you see the
uh the warning icon
we do support blender 2.8 in fact you
can see i'm using the latest blender
2.81 nightly build if you want to use
nightly builds feel free to let our
support know and we'll add the latest
build to our list of supported apps on
the farm here's what the render image
will look like but this was rendered at
1080p
i think and as you can see at a certain
level of zooming in the details uh are
lost because of the lack of pixels
basically
and now i'll go through the render drop
down and then in render beamer i'll hit
beam it up
so we get a prompt to contact support if
we need auto run python scripts and in
this case we don't so the plugin will
start preparing the scene and its assets
for rendering over the farm as soon as i
move past this prompt so i'll hit ok
so what's happening now is beamer is
preparing a file and all of its
assets for use on our file server so the
textures are being re-linked to be
readable from within our file server
directory and not my local path and
we've come across another prompt and it
tells us that we have older versions of
some of the texture maps on this project
directory over at the farms file server
and this is great to know in case i
didn't want to overwrite these maps with
the new ones but let's go ahead with the
upload and so now uh the prep file is
being uploaded and as it finishes we'll
be given a link to our web dashboard
where we can submit our render job and
here we are
with the generated link
so i'm going to click here
and i'll be directed to my web manager
so here's our job submission panel and
here we get one more look
at our settings before we launch the job
i appreciate that i get to review these
settings before launching my job because
it saves me time and credits
for instance i forgot to set my frame
range to a single frame
and
nobody in the right mind would render a
sequence at this res
so i'll go ahead and fix that
next i'll change my priority to medium
and my blender version to the latest
available
at the time
of this recording at least i can finally
also set my camera if i wanted to assign
another camera as active on the fly oh
and also here is the option for the
number of strips i want my image divided
at
i'll set the 25 and launch the job
so now i've got two jobs in my queue
and this is where we can keep track of
our running renders
and as you can see we've got all the
important information we need listed
here
from the number of nodes
acquired to the progress to the time
remaining and the actual and estimated
costs
the current running job represents the
image strips rendering and the one
waiting above represents the merging
process where
all of the strips are combined to
produce the final high-res image
okay let's move ahead to our finished
jobs and now we can bring back the
render beamer interface
and look at the download tab where we
can find our previously rendered
projects
so in this case i'll just right click on
our only job and hit download and the
frames will start downloading to the
directory we specify when we install
renderbeamer
okay so now that now you can see we have
the renders of every strip
and
in its own folder the final merged image
the resulting image because of the size
of this resolution was at around two
gigabytes and i had to make use of one
of our remote systems over at the farm
to be able to open it at all so
let's have a look
and as you can see
we have the
high resolution image merged seamlessly
in all of its detailed glory
so that's a basic rundown on how you can
use our
high image resolution distributed
rendering feature
over at garagefarm.net
thanks for watching
you