Maya 2015 Arnold - rendering across two computers?

[malachi_duncan]

Hello CG Community 🙂

I am a Freelancer and i have a two computer set up with Maya 2015 rendering with Arnold. I would like to render between the two computers but i do not know where to start.

one is a desktop i7 4770k 3.4GHZ, 11gb Ram GTX650 graphics card

second is the new dell precision m3800   i7-4712HQ Processor (Quad Core 2.30GHz, 3.3GHz Turbo, 16gb DDR3 RAM , Quadro ® K1100M, w/ 2GB GDDR5.

What do i need to do to start up a small render farm? Will i need to third computer to be a manager? Will i need to purchase a mini server, or can i just use windows standard home networking to link the hard drives using the broadband?   

Any advice will help as another computer rendering equals half the render time for me 🙂

Thank you for your insight guys 🙂 

[Glowbeard · Accepted solution]

Hey dude.

LONG time maya and Arnold user here.  VFX Supervisor to boot 😉

Simple way you can just open the scene on two machines and have each render a given amount of frames.  Simple but VERY inefficient.

Second, get Deadline from Thinkbox!  I use it ALL the time!!!  For your case, Deadline (For FREE) works on two nodes (which you have) and can distribute frames across both machines eavenly.  Wow "eavenly" doesn't look spelled right at ALL!

It is a bit of a hassle to set up for Arnold, but I figured it out using Maya 2014 (Hate 2015) and Arnold.  And you can have your slave machine work as the master as well so you don't need a server.