Blender render farm questions, answered

Rendering on blender.farm costs about $3 per render hour. You are billed in 5-minute blocks and only while Blender is actually rendering, so billing starts when Blender starts and stops when it stops. There is no subscription, no monthly minimum, and uploading and downloading your files costs nothing.

One credit buys 20 minutes of render time. Credits get cheaper in larger packs: 10 credits cost $9.99, which works out at $3.00 per render hour, and 200 credits cost $149.99, or $2.25 per render hour. Credits do not expire.

Your job gets a dedicated NVIDIA RTX 5090 with no queue in front of it, so the total is roughly your per-frame time on that card multiplied by the number of frames, plus a couple of minutes to boot and pull your files. A 5090 has several times the throughput of the cards most artists render on, so the per-frame figure is usually a lot lower than what you see locally.

The practical way to find out is to render a single frame first. That costs 1 credit, tells you your actual per-frame time on an NVIDIA RTX 5090, and multiplying it out gives you a reliable estimate for the whole range before you commit to it.

No. There is no card, no subscription and no minimum. blender.farm is in founding beta, so accounts are invite-only for now: apply on the beta page, and accepted artists get 10 free credits.

That is about 3h 20m of NVIDIA RTX 5090 render time, which is enough to upload a real project, render it and download the frames rather than trying a demo scene. Free trials are usually advertised in dollars, but a trial is only worth what it renders, so the number that matters is the render time.

Yes. SheepIt is a free, community-powered render farm for Blender and it is a genuinely good option for personal projects, test animations and learning. It runs on volunteered machines: you earn render points by contributing your own GPU, and jobs are queued rather than guaranteed.

The trade-offs are that your job waits in a queue behind everyone else's and there is no privacy guarantee, which rules it out for confidential client work. If you are rendering a personal project and you do not mind waiting your turn, use SheepIt. If you want the frames on a schedule you control, or the work is not yours to share, a paid farm is the safer choice.

Yes. The blender.farm add-on runs inside Blender, so you can upload and launch a render without leaving your scene or opening a browser. It is free, it is optional, and the browser upload still works if you prefer it.

The add-on asks Blender directly what your scene references, so it follows linked libraries, expands VDB and simulation cache sequences by itself, and picks up custom add-ons and OCIO configs. It also removes the 5 GB browser upload limit by uploading large files in parts. Unchanged files are not re-uploaded between renders, which matters when a scene carries several gigabytes of caches.

blender.farm renders every Blender release from 4.4.3 to 5.2.0: 4.4.3, 4.5.0, 4.5.1, 4.5.2, 4.5.3, 4.5.4, 4.5.5, 4.5.6, 4.5.7, 4.5.8, 4.5.9, 4.5.10, 4.5.11, 4.5.12, 5.0.0, 5.0.1, 5.1.0, 5.1.1, 5.1.2, 5.2.0. Blender 4.5 is the current LTS. The version stored in your .blend decides which render image the job launches on, so your file runs on the Blender version it was saved with.

A file saved with anything older than Blender 4.4 is refused before it uploads, with a message telling you which versions we run, rather than being quietly rendered on a version it was not made for. New Blender releases are added as images are built and verified on a real machine.

The one it was saved with. We match the minor version of your .blend to the matching Blender build, so a file saved in Blender 5.1 renders in Blender 5.1.

That matters most for geometry nodes, which are the setups most likely to break when a farm renders your file on a slightly different version. Because the version is matched rather than approximated, a geometry nodes scene renders the way it does on your machine. Add-ons are the other half of that question: anything that generates geometry at render time has to be uploaded with the job.

Yes. Both of Blender's built-in engines are supported. Cycles renders with OPTIX on our NVIDIA RTX 5090 cards, falling back to CUDA if OPTIX is unavailable, and denoising runs on the GPU including compositor denoise nodes.

Third-party render engines such as Redshift, V-Ray, Octane and LuxCore are not supported. The render machine runs stock Blender, and a scene set to one of those engines is flagged with a warning before you can launch it rather than failing after you have paid for a machine.

Yes, because you send them with the job. Nothing is preinstalled and you are not restricted to a list somebody else maintains: your add-ons are detected in your scene, and the ones needed at render time are zipped up and installed on the machine before Blender starts.

The browser flow lists every add-on it detects so you can tick the ones the render actually needs, and the Blender add-on does the same from inside Blender. Add-ons that only affect modelling or the interface can be left out. Anything that builds geometry, shading or effects at render time has to be included, or that part of the scene will be missing from your frames.

Stills work. A single frame is just a one-frame range, and it is the cheapest way to test a scene before committing to the full animation.

A still renders on one NVIDIA RTX 5090 rather than being split into tiles across several GPUs, and it is billed in the same 5-minute blocks as anything else, so a frame that takes 4 minutes costs 0.25 credits.

Frames stream back as they finish, so you can download completed frames while the rest of the job is still rendering instead of waiting for the whole animation. You can download them from the dashboard on any device, individually or as a zip.

PNG sequences come back as PNG, one file per frame. A file set to an FFmpeg video renders natively as that video, with the codec and container from your scene, and arrives as a single file at the end. Other image formats currently come back as PNG. Extra passes and multi-layer EXR written through compositor File Output nodes are collected separately and downloadable as one zip.

A texture was not sent with the file. The usual cause is an absolute path: a texture pointing at a folder on your own drive cannot be resolved on any machine but yours.

Before your machine boots, we read your .blend and list every external file it references, marking anything we do not have as needed. Attach those files, or point at the folder they live in and every matching row is filled at once. You can also avoid the whole step in Blender with File, External Data, Pack Resources, which moves textures inside the .blend. Packing does not cover simulation caches or linked libraries, so those still need attaching.

Yes. Bake fluid, smoke, cloth, soft body and particle simulations locally before you upload, and send the cache files with the job.

This is the most common way an otherwise correct render comes back wrong, because a baked scene opens perfectly on your own machine: the cache sits in a folder next to the .blend and nothing inside the file guarantees that folder travels with it. A simulation that renders as its first frame repeated, or does not appear at all, is a cache that did not get attached. Cache and volume sequences need every frame, not just the first, and the Blender add-on expands those sequences for you.

Frames that already rendered are kept and stay downloadable, so a job that stops partway is never a total loss. You relaunch with the range narrowed to the frames you still need rather than re-rendering the ones you already have.

If a job never reaches the point of rendering, the credits reserved for it are released back to your balance automatically. Because billing only runs while Blender is rendering, a machine that fails to boot costs you nothing. Every render also keeps its logs for 30 days, so a failure that is not obvious can be looked at rather than guessed about.

Yes, and the mechanics are worth knowing before you upload someone else's project. Your files go from your machine straight to object storage under your own account and are pulled from there by the render machine, so file contents never pass through our web backend. Access is through time-limited links, not public URLs.

The render machine is destroyed when the job ends, along with everything on it. Uploads, frames and logs are deleted after 30 days. We are a small operation and do not carry the studio compliance certifications the large farms advertise, so if your client contract requires one, check it before you commit.

30 days. That covers uploaded files, rendered frames, video output, extra outputs and logs, all of which are deleted after 30 days.

Files reused by the upload cache are kept for 30 days from their last use, and that clock resets every time a file is reused, so re-rendering a scene keeps its assets alive. Credits never expire. Treat 30 days as a hard cleanup rather than an archive and pull your frames down when a render finishes.