Hi everyone!
Looking for ways to reduce the time taken to render out animations and simulations, I came across Sheep It!. It’s basically a distributed render platform, where a bunch of people lend their computer’s processing power to others in order to reduce render times. The lamp animation I just posted would have taken somewhere between 26 and 32 hours. Using Sheep It!, it was rendered in two and a half hours.
There’s caveats of course: you have to leave your computer available for use by other people in the network in order for your own projects to be given priority in a queue. And of course, there’s security issues, so I’d probably not use it for paid gigs or sensitive material, and never without a VPN.
I hope some of you find this useful! The less time you spend rendering, the more time you can spend learning and creating!