EEVEE render farm: why a real-time engine still needs one

What an EEVEE render farm is

EEVEE is Blender's real-time engine. Instead of following every path of light the way Cycles does, it rasterises the scene, the way a game engine does, and layers shadows, reflections, volumetrics and, since Blender 4.2, ray tracing on top. A frame takes a fraction of the time a Cycles frame would. EEVEE also runs only on a GPU; there is no CPU fallback.

An EEVEE render farm is a set of machines running Blender that render your frames for you. No frame depends on the one before it, so a sequence is split across the farm and rendered side by side rather than one after another.

Fast frames, a lot of them

"Real-time" describes the viewport, not the final render. At final quality, with the render sample count up, ray tracing on, volumetrics, motion blur and a 4K frame, EEVEE is no longer rendering in real time. A frame still takes seconds, and EEVEE work is where frame counts get large: motion design, product loops, animated shorts, walkthroughs that run for minutes, often at 50 or 60 frames per second for the screens that play them.

Do the sum on one walkthrough. Four minutes at 60 frames per second is 14,400 frames. At ten seconds a frame, that is 40 hours of your GPU for a single deliverable. The engine is fast; the count is what makes it long, and the count is what a farm takes apart: the more frames there are, the more of them render side by side.

Frames this short also change where the time goes. When the GPU spends only seconds on a frame, the work around it becomes a large share of it: evaluating the animation, modifiers and geometry nodes for every frame, and compiling shaders, all of which run on the CPU. So our nodes are custom machines with a strong CPU as well as a very strong GPU, and the evaluation tells us how your project behaves so they are set up for it. Across 14,400 frames, that overhead adds up.

The whole batch at once

EEVEE work also rarely comes one piece at a time. A product range is a loop per product. A campaign is the same animation in landscape, portrait and square. Rendered at home they queue behind each other, and the last one is ready days after the first.

On the farm each project is its own job with its own evaluation, and they render at the same time rather than in a line, so the batch comes back together. Each one stays isolated from the others, and the machines that render it are destroyed when they finish. One short loop that renders in an hour at home is not worth sending. Ten of them are.

There is nothing to watch while it renders. On a batch, a live preview is thousands of frames arriving seconds apart, from scenes you already tested at home. What a batch billed to a client needs is a price and a date for each project, and each evaluation gives you both, fixed, before any of it starts. The quotes wait seven days: send them to your client, get the okay, and start the renders from your phone, wherever you are. Price your batch: every project in it gets its own free evaluation.

In EEVEE, the Blender version is part of the look

Blender 4.2 replaced EEVEE with a rewrite. Files from earlier versions still open in newer Blender and are converted, but the lighting and the shadows are computed differently, and some settings simply no longer exist. Bloom is the obvious one: it was a render setting in EEVEE Legacy and was removed in 4.2, where the effect moved to the compositor's Glare node. Open a 4.1 file in 4.2 and render it, and the glow you signed off on is not in the frame.

So a farm that renders your EEVEE file in whatever Blender it happens to run is rendering a different picture. Ours reads the version the file was saved in and renders in that version, Legacy or not, without you asking. The four test frames are there so you can see it for yourself before paying. On a batch that spans projects from before and after 4.2, each one renders in its own version.

What to check before you upload an EEVEE project

The route through the farm is the same as for any project: upload in the browser or from Blender with LaunchControl, get the evaluation, choose a tier, collect the frames from your dashboard. Setting up a new render walks through it screen by screen, and the Blender render farm page covers how the whole farm works.

• Bake your light probes. The farm renders the indirect lighting that is stored in the file. In EEVEE from 4.2, bake each Volume light probe; in EEVEE Legacy, use Bake Indirect Lighting in Render Properties. An unbaked scene renders flat.
• Set the render samples on purpose. The viewport and the render have separate counts, and the render count is the one the farm uses. It is also most of what decides the price.
• Pack your textures and bake your simulations, so everything the frames need travels with the project. The preparation guide covers both.
• Output an image sequence, not a video file: why pros render in image sequences.

LaunchControl can do the preparation from inside Blender, and whatever slips through shows up in the four test frames rather than in the finished sequence.

Questions about rendering EEVEE on a farm