Unreal Engine renders in real time until you ask it for final pixels. Then a Movie Render Queue job with high temporal samples, path tracing or 4K output can take minutes per frame, and a two-minute cinematic becomes an overnight render that ties up your workstation. A render farm splits the sequence across many GPUs and brings it back in a fraction of the time.
This guide covers how to prepare an Unreal Engine project for a render farm and how Unreal rendering works on Sky Render Farm.
What the farm supports
Sky Render Farm renders Unreal Engine 5.5, 5.6, 5.7 and 5.8 projects (.uproject) with:
- Movie Render Queue
- Path Tracer
- Lumen
- Hardware Ray Tracing
The project renders on the same engine version you authored it in.
How Unreal rendering works here: node rental
Unreal Engine runs as node rental. You choose the graphics cards (RTX 3090, RTX 4090 or RTX 5090) and how many nodes to rent, and you pay for the seconds they run. Each node shows its GPU, VRAM, CPU, disk, network speed and hourly rate before you rent it.
There is no queue. Nodes are rented for your job when you submit it, which takes about a second, rather than waiting for a shared pool to free up.
Because billing is per second, renting more nodes does not significantly raise the total: the sequence is a fixed amount of work, and 15 nodes simply finish it much sooner than 2. The pricing guide works through an example.
Preparing the project
Keep everything inside the project. Content, plugins and any external files the level uses must live in the project folder. Marketplace and custom plugins should be in the project's Plugins folder rather than installed only into your local engine.
Save a Movie Render Queue preset. Configure the job in Movie Render Queue (output resolution, format, anti-aliasing, console variables) and save it as a preset or saved config, so the farm renders exactly the settings you tested.
Choose the output format. EXR sequences for compositing and grading; PNG for quick delivery. Avoid rendering directly to a video file for long sequences: an image sequence survives an interrupted frame, a video file does not.
Check the sequence and level. Confirm the correct level sequence, the map it uses, and the frame range.
Movie Render Queue settings that matter
Anti-aliasing. Temporal and spatial sample counts are the main cost driver in MRQ. Raise temporal samples for clean motion blur, but test: going from 8 to 32 can quadruple render time for a barely visible difference.
Warm-up frames. Use engine and render warm-up frames so particles, cloth and Lumen lighting settle before the first captured frame. Without them, the start of each shot can flicker or pop.
Console variables. Put quality overrides (Lumen quality, shadow resolution, ray tracing settings) into the MRQ console variables rather than changing project settings, so the render uses them and your editor does not.
Path Tracer. Physically accurate and much slower than Lumen. Use the denoiser and set samples per pixel by testing a few frames, not by guessing.
VRAM
Unreal projects with Nanite geometry and large virtual textures can use a lot of graphics memory at 4K. RTX 3090 and 4090 nodes have 24 GB; RTX 5090 nodes have 32 GB. If a shot runs out of memory locally at render resolution, choose RTX 5090 nodes or reduce texture streaming pool demands in the MRQ console variables.
Submitting
- Install SkyRender Desktop. It adds the Sky Sender plugin to Unreal Engine.
- Submit from Sky Sender. SkyRender Desktop validates the project and reports anything the farm cannot load before uploading.
- Choose the nodes, automatically (cheapest first up to your balance) or by picking specific cards.
- Frames download automatically to your chosen folder as they finish.
Test first
Render a short range, including the heaviest part of the sequence, before the full job. It confirms the project renders correctly on the farm and gives you the real time and cost per frame. New accounts receive free SkyPoints for test jobs.
Read more on the Unreal Engine render farm page, or follow the Quick Start guide for your first job.
