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.
If you’re not ready to render anything you can start banking credits on SheepIt by joining. You will then download their client and it will take take of the rest.
Though Blender rendering can be resource intensive, you can even restrict the use of your computer’s CPUs and memory in case you still want to be able to use your computer. It’s also easy to pause or exit out of.
