We Built a Blender Render Farm Out of Four Laptops

Description and use

A render farm built from four laptops using Flamenco, Tailscale, and Samba enabled efficient rendering of a 4‑minute Blender film.

Problem

Render a 4‑minute Blender film (≈7,300 frames) efficiently using limited hardware.

Outcome

The farm successfully rendered 60 frames across four machines, producing identical output and demonstrating the feasibility of a low‑cost, multi‑OS render farm using open‑source tools.

Workflow

• 1. Set up shared Samba folder on laptop and expose via Tailscale.
• 2. Mount share on Linux workers at /mnt/spidey and on Windows at D:\spidey using mklink.
• 3. Convert all absolute asset paths in .blend to relative paths.
• 4. Configure Flamenco Manager with two‑way variables for shared paths.
• 5. Ensure Blender is discoverable on each worker (set file association on Windows).
• 6. Submit a small test job (60 frames, 360p) to verify functionality.
• 7. Monitor job progress via Flamenco web dashboard.
• 8. Scale up to full film once reliability confirmed.

Evidence

We built a render farm out of four laptops on a Saturday evening.

Source

Flamenco does not move your files around. The manager and every worker must be able to see the same files, on a NAS or a file server or some other shared drive.

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Tailscale just creates a private network so all our laptops can talk to each other.

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The first milestone was gloriously low‑tech. Someone created a file from Windows. I created one from Linux. Both files showed up on both machines.

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Claude inspected street_part2_b.blend and found 31 external asset references. 25 of them were absolute paths starting with /home/lovestaco/pers/lr_demo/...

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The Windows worker printed this: "There was an error finding Blender on this system."

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