The need of a renderfarm

When you are a small company that work with animation in general and realistic rendering in particular the bottleneck in the production pipeline is often the rendering capabilities. As I`ve mentioned before I have started the process of setting up a render farm at Petfactory. We have reached the point when our rendering pipeline has become a speed/time issue. But setting up a render farm can be a really expensive project ! Especially if your are aiming for a rack server solution. The main aim with our render farm is to render with Maya – Mental Ray and Adobe After Effects. Since it is expensive and the developement in the hardware area is rapid the need to understand and make a somewhat “future proof” decision of what to buy feels important. The most important aspects of the renderfarm is to get as much render capacity / $, create a scalable solution and to set up a stable environment that is pretty straightforward to use without the need to get to lowlevel technical. And so the hunt for the render farm is on !