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USE Render Farm

A render farm for Blender that I built at USE: the office's own machines share a render, and no machine is used without its owner's yes.

Role
Idea, design and testing of the tool
Tools
  • Blender
  • Claude Code
Technology
Flamenco / Python / Rust and Tauri
Format
Interactive, runs live in the browser
Test environment with the farm's real interface, running in the browser Open in new window
How to use the demo
  • Double-click USE Render Farm to open the app
  • Drag skib_v03.blend or logo_anim.blend into the window
  • Press Submit render and watch the machines take frames
  • Keyboard: Enter on a file sends it to the app

Why

At USE we rendered in Blender on our own PCs. A long render tied up one machine for hours while the others stood idle, and frames were not always named the same way.

SheepIt and Flamenco

The idea comes from SheepIt, which I used at 3D College to render on PCs nobody was using. You earn points by lending out your machines and spend them on other people's. Your own machines put your projects first, but it is not guaranteed, and if they are busy with something heavy, you wait. You also have no say in which frames are rendered in which order. I wanted a local SheepIt on our own machines. Flamenco is local, but it was an ugly web page with too many steps, where you had to open the .blend file and send it from inside Blender. The farm takes the best of both: SheepIt's simplicity, Flamenco's local setup, drag and drop, and frames in order from start to finish, so you can take over yourself if the farm stops.

How it works

You drag a .blend file into the app, and the other machines are asked whether they will help. No answer counts as no. Each machine takes the next free frame, so faster machines take more. At the end every frame is checked and a preview video is made. The test environment at the top shows this with made-up machines and finished frames.

What went wrong

Most bugs were found in use. Cycles rendered on the CPU, even on an RTX 3090, until each machine started picking its graphics card itself. A MacBook that had gone to sleep was marked as broken and got no more frames, so now the hub brings it back by itself.

Built
2 September to 26 October 2026
Based on
Flamenco 3.9.3
Machines
4, Windows and Mac
Test
677 frames in 4K: 12 min on one PC, 7 min on two
Code
About 13,400 lines
App
Rust and Tauri, about 8 MB

On top of Flamenco

The farm is built on Flamenco 3.9.3. On top of it sit a hub with the queue and the consent rules, a desktop app in Rust and Tauri of about 8 MB, and the scripts each machine runs. The code is made with Claude Code, which I directed. I set the direction, made the decisions and tested the farm on real renders.