5
« on: 2023-09-07, 10:17:12 »
Hello Everyone, and thanks for your help.
I am now finally convinced to build my own render farm. I need more render power and online render farms are not an option due to long waiting lines (many still renders, so quick to process, but I need them fast), lack of control and random issues I always seem to come by.
I am happily rendering on Corona for C4D on a Mac Studio M1 Ultra 128 GB ram with no complaints: the machine is powerful yet super silent and sits quietly on my desk. Still, I need to speed up the workflow, thus the render farm.
A few dumb questions, to whom it has more experience in the field that I do:
_Do render nodes need to be as powerful as the main machine? (Probably not)
_Sometimes I find to be short on ram due to very high-poly-count scenes, does that mean that all the render nodes should also have 128GB of ram? (It seems quite unreasonable)
_Is it better to buy a big and powerful (and expensive) machine like a TR 5995 with lots of ram, or is it fine to have many cheaper render nodes?
_It seems that the new M2 Mac Mini has quite a good price to performance ratio and packs everything I need to set up the render farm. Is it a stupid idea to buy 10 Mac Minis instead of one big machine? Or do I need more ram on every unit?
_Do I need to move all my resources and assets to a dedicated server?
_What would you do with a budget of 5 to 10k?
Any suggestions? Thank you All :)