Blender

Hi,
i want to build myself a workstation for Blender. I am doing some 3D animations - about 5-8min long (only very seldom a still-picture rendering).

I have tried to get a specific answer in special Blender-forums - but the answers are opposite - one says this the other one says that... maybe you can help me out in this forum:

Now my question: Is it better for my needs (animation) to invest in one giant powerful workstation with multiple GPUs (max. 6 GPUs) or to build 3 render-nodes with each 2 GPUs and connect them via network?
I have some concerns for each variant: The one huge WS will easily become very expensive and i have to spend all money at once. Then I have also read that mulitple render machines will scale better than one powerful.
But for the render-nodes i have the concern, that it seems to be sketchy to set it up especially working with GPUs (with different amount of VRAM and so on)... i don´t even know if that is possible at all? Does there exist a GPU based network-render engine for Blender? The pros for the nodes would be: i could expand and invest with my needs and my budget and i find them easier to upgrade (you can do one by one when new GPUs hit the market).

I would really appreciate any thoughts, recommendations and help for this since i am a noob in this field...

Here the answers i got so far in other forums:

Cycles scale well up to 3-4 cards on complex scenes and I know from Octane, Cuda scale nearly 100% up to 8 or more cards.
Cycles is not so good but the developer work on it.
One big system is much more effective than 3-4 small ones.

It depends what you are rendering. For previews and single frames, multiple cards in the same machine are superior. You cannot currently net-render single frames. You can have multiple machines work on them, but you do it by having them each render the same image with a different render seed, them mix them all. (500 samples at seed 0 + 500s samples at seed 1 = 1,000 samples.) You could also split an image up by tiles, but that's not really any better.undefined> It also matters if your cards are working together or separate. Two cards working on the same render only gives you ~50-60% of the speed of the second card. For this reason, it can be better to have the cards work separately. In the case of animation, instead of having 2 cards work on the same frame and suffer a hit, it will often be better to have them work separately on 2 different frames, so each gets full power. So, maximum speed comes from an environment where you can run multiple instances of blender, with each card working on a separate frame range. That also means you can assign appropriate parts of a scene to stronger or weaker cards (such as if you had some lower VRAM cards, you could give them a renderlayer with less going on.)
Sounds like multiple nodes are the better option.

So my specific questions are: is a single WS performance-wise better than multiple render nodes if i am rendering animations (5-8min long)? And: Are GPU-based Render-nodes even possible in Blender? If yes: Which renderer i have to use?

I don´t need an advice how to build a powerful WS and so on... (i write this, because often people send me just a hardware-list instead of trying to answer my questions)

check the hardware thread. I posted your answer. And to be honest, you titled your post as a "build" for blender. What did you expect us to respond with?

Have you looked up the blogs/logs/info from blenders various open movie projects? I imagine they have by now somewhat perfected the blender workflow and how they render out scenes might be useful to look and see if they have put out I information on that.

if you want it simple, keep it on a single system as much as u can see from there if you need even more.
you will always need to preview your work during the design so if u dont have to wait there it saves some time.
for whats basicly a farm you may want to look at external resources to rent cycles render servers