Hi, hopefully, some people can help or at least enlighten me
I am running blender on an SGI Onyx RE2 system, a rather nice system concerning the fact that it was for free. Seriously, this machine is quite fast, it features four R6600 MIPS 250 Mhz CPUs with 4 MB Cache each, and that’s where my “problem” lies. As I understand it, Blender does not scale, thus it will always only utilize one CPU (this is also what I see on the system panel). I red some hints in this forum about giving the render thread to the second CPU. Is this possible? I’d love to render on the second CPU while I work on the first. Can anybody tell me is this is possible? Or if future development of Blender (when the fund raises enough money and it is opensource) plans to make it SMP ready?
Or is there some kind of third party network render engine for blender which I can run on one (or, in the best case, three) of the other CPUs?
Right. You’ll need to run two separate instances (absolutely no clue how to do this in Irix). The render instance would be started as command-line only. After it’s chugging away on one proc., fire up a new, full GUI instance of Blender and slave it to one of the other procs.
I used to do this with my 2 proc machine, but it was NT4, so your mileage may vary.
I’ll try it tonight. By running it “from the command line” I guess you mean running it gui-less, so it act similar to a deamon (since in IRIX, you run everything from the command line).
But…where do I tell the actual GUI Blender to use the other running process as the render process???
Oh. I see what you’re saying. You want to be modelling, then fire of a seperate render thread of your current model, then immediately go back to modelling and have Blender serve up the multi-proc render for your viewing pleasure when it’s done.
that would be an ideal solution, but isn’t it still possible to somehow run a renderer as a second process and tell blender to use this process? If not,
when I render via command line, I guess it doesn’t output the result to the screen but will put it into the /render directory (or whatever I specifiy). Do I get this right that I can run one “normal” blender and run a second one from the command line which renders a .blend file for me and places the rendered image or movie in some directory while I continue to work in the other process? I mean I can fire up as many blender as I want, I already tried, but I found no way to make them communicate with each other…
or is there any IRIX based network render engine which blender can use?
