Fun with Render Farming and Noise

Recently we stumbled upon greyscalegorilla.com which offers a lot of interesting cinema4D tutorials. One that stood out to us was on how to turn many computers into a render farm. In order to try that, we created a scene and rendered it using a net render server.

First we needed a scene. There is another tutorial on how noise applied on objects with displacers can result in beautiful geometry. So we created some basic objects and played around with different kinds of noise. Here is what one of our results looked like:

If you want to try that yourself, we wrote a script that creates all the objects and their hierarchy on our github. Once you run the script, all you have to do is apply noise shaders on the displacers and fine tune their parameters to your liking. Here is what the base version looks like without and with noise. There are many different kinds of noise shaders, which are fun to play around with. Note that the materials are also created by the script as an initial 'suggestion', you may want to choose others.

Next we set up the render farm. First of all we use an older version of cinema4D (R14) which does not support the current team render but instead uses the older net render. It comes in two flavors, the net render server and the net render client. Both can be installed through the regular c4d setup. You have to set up the net render server on a single machine (we choose our main computer) and you have to set up the client on every machine that is part of your farm (including the main computer!). The setup itself is rather simple. You have to define a folder for storing data as well as the ip adress of the host machine and an open port that you want to run the server on.

Both the server and client have to be configured and restarted (!). After that you can reach your server from your webbrowser under the ip address you configured. There you create a job and assign it your c4d project file. When starting the job the net server will assign frames of your render to different clients/machines that will start to render them. The resulting images will all be stored in your net servers data folder. As soon as a client is finished with its frames it will be assigned some unfinished frames from the other clients. You can get the results either from the data folder or through the browser interface. Here is what the interface looked like for our render job. Also we learned how to set up net render through this tutorial.