Backburner - The Poor Man's Render Farm

Render by Gilles Tran - Wikimedia Commons 

Rendering, as my old tutor at Escape Studios used to say, "is where everything starts to go wrong". Here at Animation Apprentice we encourage our students to present finished, polished work for their demo reels, properly lit, textured and rendered out. But this poses problems - render times can be long and, as deadlines loom, any technical failure can be fatal to a timely submission.  So, in the absence of a high-end render farm, how do students render their work on time? The answer is Backburner - the poor man's render farm.