How to implement an automated render farm with remote access? I'm in a bit of a fun spot where I have full access to a VR arcade and a couple dozen GPU's inside it. Each of the computers is running Windows 10 and is on their own high speed internal LAN with a NAS.
In my spare time, I've been dabbling with small Blender animations as a hobby and wanted to utilize the processing power of the arcade at night to speed up render times. So my question is, how would I best go about doing that from outside of the network, without installing anything that would disrupt the regular operation of the arcade?
It's worth noting I can turn on/off the computers remotely, but not dual-boot into Linux remotely. I can also VNC into the individual computers, but I'd rather things be automated than have to start blender or some other other software on each computer each time I want to render something.
I've tried several solutions, including a Flamenco server, using third party plugins like CrowdRender, Prism pipeline's Pandora, etc. But they're all way over-complicated or only work on local networks. I ended up finding myself sinking more time into setting up the distributed rendering than I did actually animating, and gave up for a while.
Instead of trial and error or reinventing the wheel, I figured someone here would have experience with something similar or be able to suggest software that'd help out, or suggest I retry certain software I've already tried before.
If they are connected to the internet, try Sheepit. If you run their client on each computer they will render for the farm and if you upload a project it will first be rendered on your own hardware so easy to setup, everybody wins. Unless 500MB file size limit is too little for your scenes and you want to use exr output with passes and render layers instead of only png that Sheepit supports. But it has the advantage of being very easy to set up.
If I am not mistaken, some of their software used for the farm is open source as well, so it's worth exploring if it may be possible to use it to setup your own farm as well.