hey everyone. if you know me i do most of my work in the game engine. i have just received of 6 dell work stations with out hard drives. (i have one 100gb hard drive to use for one of them) they all have Pentium 4 processors and 1gb+ of ram. im looking to build a render farm and im toying with different ideas. well my first question.
can a single frame be distributed across more than one computer?
should i use Linux or windows?
should i use a shared folder and just have each computer render different frames(can be done within blender)?
i know of dr. queue. but have no idea how to set it up.
and the last big thing. can i do a network boot and load the os off of a remote drive? or do all of the pcs. need hard drives with the os on it?
single frame: no
win or linux: your choice, both work well tih blender
network render: b2.5 has a new network renderer integrated. use that. b2.4x you can just point the output frames to a network directory and use the touch button. (eg started frames are created and not picket up by other nodes if they already exist)
ah gotcha. well i have been thinking about putting hard drives in all of them. i have a 100gb in my master. and i have a 20 and a 30 gb for the slaves. im thinking of just setting ubuntu up on all of them and turning it into a Beowulf cluster. but i dont know if blender would render over the cluster that way. is there an alternate render engine that can split one frame across multiple nodes?