What is the render farm?

Many of us have been amazed many times with beautiful landscapes in computer games and in animated 3D films, special effects in a movie and with creative solutions in ads. All of them were created using modern technologies such as rendering.

Rendering is the process of creating a flat image (picture) from the developed 3D-model. In other words, it is obtaining a photographic image by calculations of lighting (like creation of shadows, reflections and refractions of light, overlay of glares) of subjects, which makes them more realistic.
The rendering process is not an easy task. Rendering the special effects for the “Avatar” movie took about 40 million computer hours. That is, if one powerful PC was used, this operation could have finished in not less than 4500 years. To accelerate the process of calculating today, a so-called “render farm” is used.
Render farm is a block of powerful servers, “sharpened” to make rendering. With their help, you can speed up the rendering in several thousand times!

To whom it is useful for

The main customers of the render farm are design studios, who require obtaining the naturalistic images of the object under construction. As long as the building exists only in the form of a drawing, and there is an excavated pit on its place, where construction work is just at the beginning stage, the customer can already imagine a future look with the help of photo-realistic sketches. The designer can easily insert a building under construction in the surrounding landscape; to draw the people and cars that move along the street next to it, and to set certain weather conditions. In addition, the rendering process is indispensable when creating a virtual tour or when animating the future or existing building. Being home, in front of your own PC, you can easily take a walk, for example, in the mall, located on the other side of town or even of Earth.
Faster and better visualization is important also for companies engaged in the creation of video clips. The colorful presentation and memorable commercials, live three-dimensional image for the outdoor ad or for booklets – all these products can be done with technologies of fast rendering.

Savings

The cost of rental of services of render farm is quite high, but the capacity of the farm allows calculating not only single files, but also long videos.
Moreover, rental of render farm allows reducing production costs so no need to neither create nor maintain in good state the own render farm. Render farm is an ideal match for small studios and users who need to create quickly a large number of three-dimensional images or videos.