Has anyone done this? Is it even a good idea? The studio I work at, along with two others were recently acquired by a larger company. I've been asked to look into whether or not it makes sense to combine or connect each location's render farms. We use Houdini/mantra and Fusion, primarily. Other studios use 3ds Max, blender, and unreal. We have around 20 nodes in our studio. Others are about the same +/-

I guess I'm wondering, how complicated is this? I guess some sort of asset path conversion would have to happen. That probably means customization of submission scripts. Maybe there is a farm manager that makes this easy? Maybe it's better to run multiple managers but allow cross-farm submision? I have so many questions. I'm not sure where to start investigating.

All recommendations or links to info are appreciated.

Thanks.

I'm hoping the houfolks are talking to AWS since that seems to be the future...

Oh man, imagine official preconfigured Linux VMs with Houdini on AWS (or Azure!), ready to roll with Solaris and Karma. That would be spectacular!

We render too much for cloud rendering to make economic sense. It would be nice to have as an emergency backup though.