VFX: smoke, fluids and Blender volumes
rendered on up to 8 GPUs in parallel

Send the caches with the scene

A simulation renders from its caches: smoke and fire, liquids, imported VDB volumes, Alembic files. In the add-on panel, the Dossier de Caches (VDB) option (cache folder) points to the folder that contains them: its contents go with the scene, compressed, because a raw VDB compresses well and those bytes go through your connection.

What the add-on checks before sending

Before each upload, the add-on checks the dependencies of the scene and lists everything missing in one go:

• a VDB volume whose file cannot be found on your disk;
• a missing Alembic or USD cache;
• a fluid domain whose cache folder does not exist, a sign that the simulation was never baked.

It also reminds you to bake cloth, fluids and particles: an unbaked simulation does not appear in the final image. The bake is started in Physics Properties, from the Cache panel of the simulation.

Volumes, memory and time per frame

Volumes are heavy on video memory. The machines served carry 24 GB (RTX 4090) or 32 GB (RTX 5090), with no guarantee of model: the RTX 5090 is only served to scenes saved with Blender 4.4 or a later version.

Motion blur and depth of field are rendered as set in your file. They lengthen the time per frame, not the number of frames: on a long shot, it is the split across machines that shortens the wait. For compositing, keep a multilayer OpenEXR output; the format of your file is kept.

Worked example: a heavy VFX shot

120 frames at 9 minutes per frame. This time per frame is that of an RTX 4090, the card TURNA falls back on. On your computer, with an RTX 3060, each frame takes about 34 minutes: count on 68 h 24 during which it can do nothing else. On TURNA, your computer stays free and, on Turbo, the shot is ready in 2 h 15.

The time on your card comes from the GPU scores of our render time calculator (in French), aligned with the Blender Open Data ranking (in French): 40 for an RTX 3060, 152 for an RTX 4090. An RTX 5090, served first, is faster than this table; the actual gap depends on the scene. Billed on the time actually used, with a 30-second minimum. For your own scene, the render time calculator starts from the time of one frame.

Frequently asked questions about VFX rendering

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