Welcome to SquidNet’s documentation!


SquidNet Render Manager - Main GUI

SquidNet is an advanced render farm management system that controls the distribution, processing and rendering of single-frame, multi-frame, video generation and workflow management requests. A SquidNet render farm consists of submitting workstations (clients), a workflow manager (master) and rendering/processing engines (slaves). Jobs are submitted from clients using SquidNet’s graphical user (GUI) and command line (CLI) interfaces. Once received, the master persistently stores these jobs in its local render queue and intelligently breaks up the requests into smaller segments that get evenly distributed to available render farm processing (rendering) nodes. These small segments, called job slices, contain rendering instructions for the processing nodes. While render nodes are processing requests, the master idly stands by waiting for job completion responses from these nodes or for incoming job requests from submitting client nodes.

The Master can be run on any networked computer (Windows, Mac, Linux), uses very little system resources and is heavily multi-threaded to support thousands of queued jobs and hundreds of client workstations and render nodes. Client nodes can also run on any computer platform and can co-exist with your 3D applications. Slave nodes are the render farm work horses and can reside on any platform as well.

Although SquidNet’s primary role is to manage render farm processing operations, it’s also a powerful tool for workflow management. With SquidNet’s transaction framework, you can schedule batch jobs that contain user-defined scripts than can be executed on any render node at any time of the day. Transactions also allow you to queue job request chains, video generation, output folder archiving and image transfer operations to remote locations using secure communications channels (SFTP/FTP, SSH, OpenSSL, etc…).

Local Farm Documentation:

Cloud Service Documentation: