SheepIt Render Farm server code goes open source
17 comments
·March 15, 2025Havoc
Joel_Mckay
Blender has had its own render farm utilities for dormant workstation utilization for sometime:
https://flamenco.blender.org/download/
The reason is simply a weird copyright paradox could form when a work is rendered on someone else's computer outside a company. No one that does media for a living will risk their revenue model on some amateur cloud service.
Now for those lucky few that have a dozen RTX 5090 laying around unused, it is a niche problem most folks wished they had right now. lol =3
Tomte
> The reason is simply a weird copyright paradox could form when a work is rendered on someone else's computer
Why? Copyright protects creativity, not hardware ownership. J.K. Rowling doesn't print her books in her apartment, either.
Joel_Mckay
An external work done by someone else is implicitly owned by that creator.
i.e. if Rowling wrote some description about a bigoted neglected single mom striking it rich, and someone else actually wrote the work... than ownership is not guaranteed without legal assignment of rights to said work (depends on the location in the world). Thus, a publisher may not pay the muse unless under legal obligation of rights transfer, and having similar works further complicate exactly who owns the copyrights.
When you publish media or games, than the providence of assets/compositions become extremely important in a commercial setting.
I didn't make the rules, but do hire project artists all the time. The paperwork involved ends up ridiculously complicated, and requires specialized lawyers. This is why we avoid "AI" content, cloud based GPU service, and any vendor ignorant enough to force the issue. =3
0cf8612b2e1e
Are there any notable works that have been created with this model? Or all hobbyist projects?
Joel_Mckay
Blender is cheaper than Maya and Autodesk Nuke... and accessible to every artist.
Thus, it is a very common tool choice behind the scenes (targeting OpenEXR frame sequences and post-render compositing layers), but the color profiles are usually still done with professional video editing software. The OpenEXR format offers a few tricks for cleaning up lighting without re-rendering a scene.
Blenders problem is it is perpetually Beta, and plugin ecosystems can be unreliable in a production setting. The film Flow was a miracle to pull off with a tool with dozens of known broken features every "release".
It is like any other tool, in that most of its features take a lot of time to master. For low-poly game assets, it is totally worth a donation. =3
Imustaskforhelp
Hmm interesting indeed.
virtualritz
> CPU or GPU but obv favours gpu
Why obviously?
MyOutfitIsVague
Rendering is significantly faster and more energy efficient on a GPU.
For those not familiar this is basically crowdsourcing rendering. You contribute compute and get credits for it that you can redeem against the collective render farm later
CPU or GPU but obv favours gpu