Animux Caseless Rackmount Animation Renderfarm is an effort
by Animux Foundation to reduce cost of ownership of an animation Studio.

Animux Foundation’s vision is to reduce the price of entry for animators into the animation industry by working on projects like the completely free Animux production pipeline (based on the free open-source software), absolutely free Animation Digital Asset Manager [ADAM] (wip), and the Animux Caseless Rackmount Renderfarm.

This blog is a detailed step by step guide on how to build the Animux Cheap Caseless Animation Renderfarm Rackmount using shelves $15 stand and $3.25 shelves, easily start up your renderfarm using Animux OS liveUSB and rendering your shots. It will also cover some of the lessons we learnt to prevent you from making the same mistakes we did. We had to go through 3 versions of our renderfarm to be able to come up with a design which would hold 12 motherboards on the 6 shelves IKEA stand.

We successfully tested out the 48 CPU Core Animux renderfarm, with the Animux OS which you can download from the animux.org web site. We rendered Bassam Kurdali’s “The Mancandy’s FAQ” (a must have for any animator interested in the absolutely free animux production pipeline) animation on it.

In a series of articles on the blog we will cover all the steps we went through to create this renderfarm. Here are the chapters in the book our journey in creating a fully functional renderfarm at a fraction of the cost.

1. Project Goals
2. Component list
3. Building the Racks in the Rackmount
4. Lessons learnt on building the Racks
5. Building the RackFrame to place the racks/chassis
6. Lesson’s learnt on building the shelves
7. Making the connections to the Racks
8. Lesson’s learnt on making the connections
9. Boot into the Renderfarm with Animux LiveUSB/LiveCD
10. Start rendering on the RenderFarm in 5 minutes
11. Making it Permanent
12. Metrics and Conclusion

Please feel free to to let us know your comments, concerns, accolades or complains.

Tags: 3d animation, Animation, blender, how to build renderfarm, maya, rackmount, Render, Render Farm, render jobs

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 11:47 pm and is filed under featured, Render Farm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.