Can Unreal Engine utilize a render farm?

Development Rendering
1

Can Unreal Engine utilize a render farm? I have a chance to purchase 20 2.8Ghz blade servers, and if I can utilize them with Unreal Engine, it would be worth it to me.

i.e. Can I set UE4.8 to utilize all the processing power of 20 servers to reduce the time it takes to compile and build a large game project? How are the big companies like Epic and Eidos Interactive utilizing Unreal Engine to get the best render times?

2

Yes it’s possible with Swarm Agent! I bought a 2nd pc to boost my lighting build times!

UE3 doc, because the one for UE4 isn’t there yet. Still valid informations

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Swarm.html

Setup tutorial for UE4 :

https://iamsparky.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/tutorial-setting-up-swarm-for-multiple-machines/

3

For building lighting, definitely. For building code though, I’m not sure, I don’t have much experience with Visual Studio

The main thing about building computer systems for network rendering is that you need to make sure they have enough RAM, since that controls the limit of what they can render, the entire level has to be loaded into memory to bake the lighting, so that can be quite a bit of resources.

4

I think I got RAM covered… 92Gb per server x 22 servers!
But awesome reply, thank you!!

5

Each blade has dual Quad Core Xeons as well…

6

good guide thanks

7

unreal installation in blade

Hi, we tried installing unreal engine in our blades but it showing error = unsupported video card. since we cant connect graphic card to a blade, i am little confused about how to fix this issue. please help me if someone have solution

Thanks

8

Run SwarmAgent.exe in Engine\Binaries\DotNET instead of the engine itself, the actual UE4 editor can’t run without a graphics card.

9

I was wondering if there are any “out of the box” render farm services for UE4, like this one.

10

I don’t know of any. Probably the only option would be doing something with Amazon web services.

11

I also just setup a renderfarm for UE4. While it works pretty well the distributen is very uneven. Don´t expect it to be like non realtime renderers where 10 additional nodes will give you 10 times the speed. With 12 nodes I roughly get 3 to 4 times the speed compared to a build just on my workstation (speaking about larger Architectural Projects). It might be different if you have a huge game world. I made a post about it here.

There is a screenshot of the distribution. As you can see most agents finish quite early while one does the main part. Still wonder if this can be tweaked ?

12

Maybe here is something useful for you.
http://rentrender.com/unreal-engine-render-farms/

13

Even with a render farm it still splits objects onto different threads, so for instance if you have an object with a very large lightmap it could finish the rest of the scene and have a single thread working away at that one object and can’t add the other threads to help finish it.

14

I don’t know if this is really a “render farm” in the way that is being talked about in this thread, but I am trying to provide UE4 builds as a service.

15

All of these tuts are for distributing lightmap bakes on a LAN, has anyone successfully done this with remote machines outside of your network over the internet?

16

Hi, I am a co-founder of https://www.cloudbaker.art/.

After going through several forums posts (like this one) looking for a cloud service to boost our build lighting times, we decided to create our own. Right now we are in closed beta, but in the following months, we’ll enter in open beta.

This is how it works:

  • Apply for a free trial or access to the closed beta at https://www.cloudbaker.art/contact.
  • We’ll contact you to provision your account.
  • Our service will automatically create a VPN for you
  • You will have access to a web dashboard to manage your workers (Swarm Agents)
  • We’ll help you to setup your local machines to connect to your assigned Swarm Coordinator.
  • Start building your lights
  • Profit!

We are working with Intel XEON powered machines, with up to 72 cores and 144GB of RAM each. In my projects, I have reduced baking times from 16 hours to only 3 using those computers (depends on the project).