Render Farm - 3DS Max with Vray

[jmvdesign]

I've out grown my current setup at work. Currently running Intel i7 2.6GHz, 12 GB Ram, 64 Bit, with 3 additional dual core render farm (servers) setup on 3ds Max Design 2011 with Vray at work. I'm doing more and more short product demonstrations/animations and would like suggestions on how I can upgrade a render farm at minimal cost. These are primarily produced for youtube.com demonstrations and I'm rendering them at 720P but suffering from the long render times (1-2 days for a 4 minute product animation). We're not planning to become an animation studio but would like to cut down the render times in half.

Should I get another quad core computer on the server to help the farm? Implement a distributed rendering system using all of the PC's at work? Thanks for the suggestions.

[PuYang]

i dont know about this in great detail, but generally, additional computers would be faster. its easier to add another computer to the que to help out render times, than to improve the computers' specs.

atleast, for the studio i work at. i find that sending shots through a farm on many computers beats less computers that have more power. the shots we work with can be fairly large, and take up to 5 minutes simply to load it up. for 1 fast computer to load up the shot, and render frames, it would end up taking longer than say, 5 weaker computers all loading it up, and rendering.

although for multiple computers, we sometimes get one computer that screws up, so every few frames will have some kinda glitch like missing textures etc ;[