Faster Rendering with the CrowdRender Addon for Blender

What is Crowdrender?

Faster rendering is what the Crowdrender addon is for. It works with both cycles and eevee, and is compatible with the latest versions of Blender. Crowdrender works by allowing you to render the same scene on multiple computers at the same time. This is called network rendering or distributed rendering and its pretty awesome!

Its awesome because you can speed up rendering without having to make compromises on quality or complexity of your work. All you need is at least two computers, and a network that connects them together. That network can even be a wifi hotspot so long as it supports computers talking to each other.

Crowdrender has been integrated into Blender so that you can render animations or stills in less time. What’s more, you’ll have all your render layers and passes (including crypto matte, AOVs and denoising) available in Blender’s compositor. They’ll also be available for output to open EXR format so you can use them in other applications. From V0.3.0 and onwards, we’ve made it much friendlier for use with scripting. So if you want to batch render things, you can now do that more easily.

Advanced stuff

If you’re a more advanced user of Blender, and use linked/appended assets in your scene, you can still use Crowdrender without packing. You’ll need to setup a shared location to reference all your assets from, there are a couple of videos we’ve done on the topic that might help (https://youtu.be/TOUSCaduE1s – windows only networks, and for those who love variety in operating systems – https://youtu.be/DU6pcOl_fW4).

Where to get it?

You can get Crowdrender for free by creating a free account at https://www.crowd-render.com/download. Your account also lets you log each of your computers in letting you see when they’re ready to be used. There are a ton more features planned for Crowdrender accounts in the future, like alerts, remote access for rendering and more.

Continuously improved, supported by the community

Over 200 people support Crowdrender via our development fund as of 2021, and this is growing. Because of this new versions are coming out all the time, but we still need help! Our goal is to make easy to use software for speeding up rendering. You can read more about this on our development fund page. There you can also sign up to support us monthly, or make a one off donation. All supporters get access to the current bleeding edge versions as well as other cool perks 🙂