As long as you’re okay if your Blender project is potentially shared with hundreds of other users on the internet, SheepIt is a great way to get your Blender renders completed quickly and for free.

I used it recently for a rush animation job.  The animation was for the debut of a live streaming broadcast.  Unfortunately I had to make some last-minute changes and I was running out of time fast!

My Blender render was taking a lot longer than I was hoping.  It was a 30 second show intro in HD 1920×1080 at 24 FPS.  That’s 720 frames, which usually wouldn’t be so bad. The scene had a lot of reflections and motion blur and I tried every trick that came to mind to lower the render time.  I lowered my render passes from 256 to 16 without much noticeable artifacting but still could not get the average frame render time below 5 minutes.

With the clock ticking I started my animation render, even using Flamenco with 3 machines on my local render farm, I was averaging about two minutes per frame.  720 frames at 2 minutes would take… A full 24 hours!

Yikes!  I had less than 3 hours before I had to deliver the animation and in that time I had to lay music and a transition over it.  Luckily, I had run up millions of credits on SheepIt so instead of lending my machine to render other peoples’ Blender projects, it was my turn!

I logged into SheepIt! and followed the simple instructions to submit a project and was happy to see within 15 minutes some monster processing power was being dedicated to render my project!  Within less than an hour, I got my PNG sequence fully rendered and ready for download.  SheepIt gave me so much time back I was no longer in “rush mode” at all.

If you expect you might need to leverage a render farm and you’re okay with the public openness about it, I suggest starting a free SheepIt account and lend your computer to build up some points that you can later redeem for your own projects later.  I’m certainly glad I was curious about SheepIt and was pleasantly surprised how things turned out.