Your own render farm
Extreme tech has an article talking about building your own render farm. So, you want to rival ILM or WETA? With off the shelf (even used hardware) it’s possible to do amazing things graphically. They discuss several things linux related as the way to go. Also ghost4linux *(g4l) is mentioned.
It really is amazing that technology that once was thousands of dollars can be replaced with leftovers. This looks like a good guide to setting up a render farm. Of course on a low budget you won’t be competing directly with ILM or WETA, but you can do some serious graphics on a fairly low budget.