Sheep it ! A Free Render Farm

Sheep it is a free lightweight render farm available for all Blender users.

Personally I use it to render short animations which doesn’t require a lot of resources. E.g. to check if an animation performs well. By scaling down the output resolution and sample density you can assure a relative fast render performance on clients. Sheep it suggests a shorter render time than 8 minutes per frame.

In the background Sheep it runs a ranking system. The more credits are gained and the higher your ranking is the faster your own projects get rendered. Gathering credits is quite easy. Start the SheepIt! client and render other projects. For every frame you render you earn credits that will be summed up and help you increase your rank.

But let’s start with a step by step guide.

Set up Sheep it ! client

First you should create a Sheep it account by going to the register site. After successfully creating the account, download the latest render farm client or use the webclient. After executing the client login and start configuring the client.

If you use a common graphical card with CUDA support you can also render with the graphical card itself. Then you can choose between CPU and GPU rendering. Recently it is possible to choose the amount threads being used and the priority of the client. Pressing the save button will start the client.

Earn Sheep it credits

After you logged in and saved the render configuration the client will download the renderer. The client renders a test picture to check if everything works as intended. Soon afterwards a first project will be downloaded and the first picture from another Sheep it user is rendered by your machine. The picture below shows the main window of the PC client. Depending on the users project its download takes a certain time. It is definitely better to have a fast bandwith. Furthermore Sheep it shares the project name as well as the result picture with you. In the picture below a random Sheep it user rendered the top of a bottle. Also you can see the current global statistic of Sheep it where you find your earned user points. I use the client for about a month and already earned around 40k user points.

That’s it.

Have fun to use this nice and free render farm.