We’ve spent a lot of time working on getting all physics to work flawlessly on our farm. The result is that almost every type of bake is supported and can be baked on our farm. There is one notable exception caused by a bug in Blender, as noted at the end of this article.
At this time, we only support baking files on our farm, due to the length of time it takes sometimes to upload the bake files. We are looking into adding support for bake uploads, but it’s going to take a while, as we’ll have to add support for FTP uploads first.
Update 2015: It is now possible to upload your own bake cache and use it to render your files on our farm. For more info on how to do this please see our knowledge base.
Here’s a list of all bake types available as of this writing and how they work with RenderStreet:
- Force Field: no baking required
- Collision: no baking required
- Cloth: saved in file: you need to bake on your own machine and save the file before uploading it. Then select “No baking required”
- Dynamic Paint: this gets rendered on RenderStreet for “vertex” format only. You should select “RenderStreet should do it”. Note that “image sequence” format is not supported, as explained below.
- Soft Body: this gets rendered on RenderStreet. You should select “RenderStreet should do it”
- Fluid: this gets rendered on RenderStreet. You should select “RenderStreet should do it”
- Smoke: this gets rendered on RenderStreet. You should select “RenderStreet should do it”
- Particle Systems: saved in file: you need to bake on your own machine and save the file before uploading it. Then select “No baking required”
If you use multiple physics in your file, you’ll have to select the appropriate option:
- when using only Force Field, Collision, Cloth or Particle Systems, select “No baking required”.
- when using any of the: Dynamic Paint, Soft Body, Fluid or Smoke, either alone, or in combination of the ones listed above, select “RenderStreet should do it”.
What has been your experience with baking files on RenderStreet and other render farms? Please let me know in the comments.
