MinRender

A lightweight render farm coordinator for small VFX teams and freelancers.

• Self-healing mesh — every node can act as coordinator. If the leader drops, another takes over automatically.
• DCC agnostic — JSON templates define how to launch any renderer. Ships with Blender, Cinema 4D, and After Effects templates + submission plugins.
• Simple setup — install, point every node at a shared folder, done.
• Fast discovery — UDP multicast for LAN, falls back to a file-system phonebook for VPNs and complex networks.
• HTTP coordination — job dispatch, progress tracking, and completion reporting over an HTTP mesh.
• Local staging — opt-in render-to-local-then-copy mode to prevent file corruption from cloud sync tools (Synology Drive, Dropbox, etc.).
• Live queue control — drag jobs to reorder the queue, change priority mid-flight, and cancel kills the renderer's whole process tree on every node, instantly.
• Resilient — each node keeps a SQLite snapshot of the leader's state. If the leader drops, a new one picks up where it left off. Worst case: frames rendered in the last 30 seconds get re-rendered.
• Windows and macOS supported

Built with C++ (Qt 6 Quick / QML) and Rust.

Install + docs

Full manual: minrender.com — install, configuration, job submission, monitoring, and the job template reference.

Windows

Requires Windows 10 (version 2004 or later) or Windows 11, x64.

macOS

Signed and notarized .dmg available from GitHub Releases. Requires macOS 12 or later.

Build from source

Requirements: CMake ≥ 3.21, Qt 6.11 (Quick / QML / Widgets / Network), a recent Rust toolchain.

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/path/to/Qt/6.11.1/<platform>
cmake --build build --target minrender -j8

The macOS release script (signs + notarizes + builds a DMG) is at scripts/macos-release.sh. The Windows build is packaged for the Microsoft Store with scripts\package.bat --msix after scripts\build_msvc.bat — see installer/STORE.md.

License

See LICENSE.