Are There Any Free Render Farms Out There?

If you lack the time or the hardware to complete the renders for your latest project, whether that be an image or animation, you will likely be required to use a render farm. Unfortunately, however, we don’t all have the financial means to outsource our projects to be rendered elsewhere.

 They won’t know render farms that are truly free for the user. However, many render farms will offer free credits for new registrants. The sheep its render farm is the closest option to being truly free, as there is no price for the frames you render. However, in this example, you need to offer your computer for rendering by others to attain the credits necessary to ask for completed projects.

Although there are no render farms that are considered to be genuinely free, there are ways in which you can reduce the costs of rendering to an absolute minimum.

What Are Some Of The Free Options For Render Farms?

To clarify, there are no free render farms out there. Even options that claim to be free will always have other hidden costs.

We’ve taken a look at over two dozen render farms worldwide and tested them for price and reliability.
Of all of these options, we found that the one that claims to be free is the sheep, its render farm. And depending on your concept of free, this is a true statement.

With SheepIt, we do not pay to have our renders completed on the sheep its render farm. Thing. Instead, it is built around a credit system where we must offer our computer to render other projects.

Because of this, she pitfalls under the category of being a community-based render farm. While you may consider that offering your device for rendering is a much cheaper alternative to rendering on a commercial-based render farm, consider that rendering generates electricity.

As you continue to render other people’s projects on your machine, spare a thought for your electricity bill, which is probably going up as a result.

It also means that you will be unable to use certain aspects of your machine, such as the GPU, while rendering someone else’s projects.

Many commercial options offer free when doing up to a certain point by providing a certain amount of accessible credit for new registers of their services.

For example. GarageFarm offers new users $25 of free credit, rising to $50 if you are only planning to use a single software for rendering.

Unless you are going to be requiring render farms regularly for high-tier renders, then $50 will be plenty for your needs. And if you are going to need more time rendering scenes, you are probably working in a commercial setting where the cost becomes irrelevant compared to other potential expenses.
Ranch Computing is another option that offers $30 of free credit for rendering when you register to try out their surface.

Are Some Render Farms Better Than Others?

While different render farms offer different financial solutions, the result of your renders will not defer between testing the render farms. We have tried multiple render farms from GarageFarm to SheepIt and found that the results are often identical.

This, of course, requires that we ensure the settings for the project are the same for each render farm. So your choice of render farm will likely not impact the final result.

Which Render Farm Is The Most Cost-Effective Solution?

The most cost-effective render farms will still be the community-based render farms like SheepIt and GradedBlue.

For the commercial render farms, costs for rendering can differ to an extent, although there will be few real outliers on the list.

Render farms that offer free credit upfront will be the most cost effective for many artists still, so our recommendation remains GarageFarm.net.

What Are Some Of The Different Types Of Render Farms?

There are a few variations of what a render farm can look like, so let us look at these variations and the differences between them.

Commercial Render Farms

The standard form of render farms is the data centers run by networking and computer-based companies.
These involve a physical building or data center that houses dozens or even hundreds of computers that can be accessed for rendering projects like high-resolution images and animations.

Technology Specific Render Farms

An alternative to traditional render farms in terms of the technology used to build them, technology-specific render farms are built around specific render engines or rendering pipelines to deliver faster results.

Examples of render farms found in this category include the AMD ProRender farm and FoxRender.

Community Based Render Farms

While most render farms require you to pay for the service to have your animations rendered on another device, there are a few options, like SheepIt and GradedBlue, that allow you to render animations for free.

The typical catch with community-based farms is that the cost comes with your own hardware, as you are tasked with rendering other artists’ projects on your own time to build up a credit score.

Self Made Render Farms

If none of the other options suit you then you can always build your own render farm. This can be based in your own home using older hardware. Or you can invest in newer hardware and have that as your rendering set up, freeing your main device for general use.

Could I Just Build My Own Render Farm Then?

A render farm is a group of devices connected to a single server, with each device responsible for a single task, rendering a frame.

You can create your own render farm from home by using old computers and linking them to your primary device using a server.

The critical issue here is cost. Even if you plan to use old hardware for your rendering, the electricity bill will be an issue.

You could advertise your render farm on social channels, but it would be challenging to get the traffic needed to cover the costs.

In addition, you may also require a degree of technical knowledge for setting up devices correctly onto a single server.