making your own renderfarm

[CU441ES]

Yeah, you should balance all the different components out, its silly spending loads of money on a cpu and you only buy 512 meg of ram. It just wont really make your pc any faster...

And talking about fast pcs, my friend just won an alienware.... Mines crap compared to that....

[dragonassasin]

yup i wanted to check bc i have 3 gig of ram n such and three identical comps with high end graphics cards

but rendering is still taking 5 miniutes on my glass and when you need to take rendershots of 20 pieces of lab glass it really hurts workflow

i just want to borrow the computers power lol. i keep old comps too so ive got say 7 computers in the house to pull from.

[Fisher]

so this 'render farm' term here... are we talking about using X computers to use their combined processing power on 1 single frame, or rather using X computers to render their own frames and compiling the images later into one movie?

is there anything wrong with installing max on all X machines, transferring the file to each machine, and telling one machine to render 0-100, the other from 101-200, the next to 201-300...and so on... then take the rendered mini-movies and combine them to one? that'd really spread the load... am I getting the idea right or am i way off the mark?

i'd love to have some kind of 'render farm' or at least one or two work stations totally dedicated to rendering...nothing else but rendering....not even MSPaint. yea... im that serious.

[MrTom]

Yeah Fisher, you just about summed it up there.

There are various ways of acheiving the same thing, backburner that comes with Max can be used to specify which 'job' you want to be rendered by which server. That server will then render that 'job' and save it somewhere.....this leaves the 'host' machine completely free to do other things.

On the other hand, you can also add the 'host' to the server list, so if you have 100 frames to render then each machine will render a different frame until all of them are done. If the machines are identicle then they should render around 50% of the frames each, this ratio will alter if one machine is slower than the other.

Distributed rendering is slightly different in that yes, you can render just one frame but use several servers to do so. The render 'buckets' basically represent the number of cpu's working on the render.

Animations can also be done via distributed rendering, but instead of one machine rendering one frame ALL the servers render the same frame. This does of course mean that the 'host' machine is tied up for the duration.

Thats the general idea behind 'farms'......more processing power when rendering....so it's quicker.

Regards.

[Bundie]

I just finished setting up distributed bucket rendering and WOW!!!
Ive only set 1 render with it and im impressed. Definatelly worth the effort to set up if you have spare PCs

[MrTom]

Glad you found it a usefull tool, it does take a little setting up but the benfits far outweigh the trouble taken. I'd be lost withought it, three (slow) machines kind of makes one fast one.......when it comes to rendering.

Now you have it up and running just be carefull with your bucket sizes and any maps you use......If the servers can't find a map on the network then the associated bucket will render incorrectly.

Any probs just shout.

Have fun!

Regards.