You hear all these terms.. Network Rendering, Distributed Rendering, Render Farm, Cloud Rendering… etc. But, if you boil it all down what you are doing is distributing the computer power needed to render a frame or set of frames to multiple computers. Some will argue that each have difference. Distributed rendering is where the job of rendering a single frame is distributed across a set of computers. Network Rendering is where each computer gets it’s own frame. A Render Farm is the set of computers used to do either of these jobs. I’m not too hip on cloud rendering but I’m guessing it’s like p2p. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

Though that’s also sort of my point here.. all these names still refer to the same thing.. Rendering with multiple computers. In other words “distributing” your render (single or multiple frames). Call it what you wish but at the end of the day it’s just semantics. All this confuses the heck out of people so hopefully this clears it up at least a little bit.. It’s all “basically” the same… it’s Distributed Rendering.  In the future all of these software packages will render single frames on multiple computers.. they could be on any network.. you may know or not know about all the computers on the network, but the task at hand is always going to be distributing rendering across computers. So, throughout this site you will most likely hear me call some of these other things “distributed rendering” because that is the most literal way to describe what is actually happening with our renders in any case.

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