network rendering

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1

hi
whats the state of play with network rendering? has anyone ever done it? what about that open source render daemon project they used to run?

i’m thinking of building myself a little renderfarm (joy!) and was wondering the best ways to do it. (linux, irix and win32 mixture to make things nice and fun!) At the moment i’m considering writing something (using shell scripting or similar) to login to remote machines, ftp a file over, render a frame and send that back so distributing on a per frame basis. my reasoning is the last big project i did took about 20 hours render time during which I couldn’t use Blender to do more work. even if my remote hosts are slower, there are more of them, and i can continue working whilst they think. anyone tried anything similar? good links on the subject?

thanks all

2

I’ll be very interested to know if anyone has done this too. May as well worm the work to other machines :slight_smile:

3

Please Please tell me that someone knows how to do this, I have a bunch of older computers just sitting around and would love to use them for renders.

4

Hello All,

here are a few links to help you with your “Render farms” !!

http://www.flyingsnail.com/reppu.html
http://www.imnetti.fi/~desaster/reppu.php3
http://www.photopro.co.uk/blender/Betas/Index.htm
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/reppu.html

Good Luck and Happy rendering !!!

5

i have done this before using the blender renderd program but the drawback is it saves each frame on the originating (server) machine in tga format not all together in an avi file so you need video editor (preferably non-linear) and take each frame into it by hand (pain in the but!!)…

if anyone knows of a program or utility for blender that can do this without us having to take each frame and build the entire film by hand, plz let us know.

as for network rendering, this way works but it has its drawbacks as you can see :frowning: just follow the instructions in the zipped file and your golden :slight_smile:

6

i have never tried it out, but isn’t it better to create a cluster ie share processortime over multiple machines… like beowulf

as for the frame by frame problem. isn’t the build in blender sequence editor any good to select all the files at a time and create an avi from it ?? i’ve used it to add a few scenes in an animation and i must say it was pretty darn convinient.

7

caronte has that program in his web www.nicodigital.com (spanish site).
I test it and works fine (he is still working in some bugs)
It render at net and make a avi (any codec) with the tga’s.
It’s no free yet :frowning: but i think it will be soon.
It has a freeware demo too.