Hi,
I have two macs and wondering is there some easy way to get both rendering?
One is Macbook pro and another is Macbook so both laptops and running Snow Leopard. Do I need some special router or such to get them together or is Airport enough?
I would love to know if someone has any experience.
Thanks
What engine are you using? 2.49 or 2.5? Do you, perchance, own Final Cut Studio or Logic Studio?
For the most basic setup to render an animation you can have both machines rendering the same blend file to a shared folder using this http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/distributed-rendering-new-render-options/ Note that ‘touch’ in blender 2.49 is now called ‘placeholder’ in blender 2.5x
I’m mainly using 2.5 with it’s own renderer, but I’m evaluating Vray for Blender also. Macbook pro is work machine and there is Final cut studio. Macbook is my private machine without Final cut.
Simple single scene render would be enough, but autodesk’s backburner kind of net render manager would be super!
How do they communicate each other?
You do have access to FC (and thus Qmaster) wonderful, use that. If you own both machines, just install qmaster node on the MacBook. If the MBP belongs to your company, you are technically not supposed to do that, although you can still have the MBP control the MB through SSH. (Give the Qmaster manual a read) Once you have them on the same Qmaster cluster (if you use them both for compressor jobs, you should already be good to go):
Toss your blend file in a shared output directory. Qmaster will make you one, you mount it by selecting File > Mount Cluster Storage in the Qmaster app or Compressor. (The Qmaster app should be in Applications on the MBP). Now, create a new generic render job that looks like this:
Then fire it off. You can use Batch Monitor to keep track of it’s progress. Note that by default qmaster will create a seperate render instance for each core, you want just one for the whole machine. Before you start, open Qmaster’s System Prefs pane, and under “rendering” remove all but one instance of “This Computer”
Thanks for detailed tip J_the_Ninja! I’ll try tomorrow and let you know how it goes 
Hi,
I see executable means it will run blender, but computers don’t know where to look?
Input and output locations are clear
Command part is little bit unclear to me.
blender -b /DIRECTORY/BLENDER.blend -0 /DIRECTORY/TEST_FOLDER /-s 1 -e 50 -j 1 -x 1 -a
what those -b and -0 are?
-s and -e are start frame and end frame right? What about -j 1 -x 1 -a???
Thanks
Whoops! Forgot a setup bit I never see. You need to add this line to your bash profile:
alias blender='/Applications/Blender.app/Contents/MacOS/blender'
If you don’t have one, just create it. It’s just a plan text file with the name .profile that lives in your home folder. You won’t see it in Finder. I recommend just opening a terminal and running
nano .profile
That will open the file in nano if it exists, or create a new one if it doesn’t. Then paste in the alias line, hit cntrl+o to save, then cntrl+x to exit nano.
-b just tells Blender to render the specified blend file on the shell rather than opening it in the GUI, you are then supposed to specify a blend file. -o (That’s the letter o, not zero) Means “output directory” Note that blender wants a trailing slash, and Qmaster doesn’t add one by default, so I just hardcoded one into the script template. -j is the step number, it allows you to set it to go every other frame or something. -x 1 forces it to append file extensions, I don’t think this is actually necessary, I think it’s on by default. -a tells Blender the command string is over, and to begin rendering an animation.
Probably should have linked you to this before too:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Render/Command_Line_Options
Sorry, but I have no idea what’s going on! It’s to ninja stuff for me who no nothing about terminal and nano 
It’s really hard to do distributed rendering without CLI stuff. If you are using 2.5 with BI, you can try the internal netrender system, but I’ve never used it.
Yeah, I tested Blender internal netrender today. I did run Client, Master and Slave on Macbook Pro and one more slave on macbook. Macbook Pro slave rendered well, but Macbook slave didn’t work even it get connected to master and received command from master. Anyway it rendered something since CPU monitor showed me there was something going on, but there was always error on Master monitor…
Shouldn’t be that hard 
I’ve attempted to set up distributed rendering on a Mac network as well and this was by far the easiest way to do it. Just make sure you put the project file and the output folder to a shared location (with the proper settings as indicated above) and then simply open and run an instance on each machine.
@J_the_Ninja I had no idea that Qmaster even existed I’ll have to look into this. I’d be using it over a network, where would I find the Qmaster node? is this on the FCP studio disks?
OK, I’m still testing my net rendering setup.
With placeholder ON and chunks set 1, all frames from 1 to 50 render nicely except last frame of non master/client machine! It’s always that way. And my slave status on my client Blender shows multiple times of same slave (macbook), but only one macbook pro which is also master/client machine… why so?
I realized my slave machine was rendering only few pixels from top and rest were black!
Yeah, on the app install disk. IIRC, it’s not in the main install package though, it has its own installer in an extras folder or something. If you use Compressor, you’ve been using it this whole time, since Compressor relies on Qmaster to run it’s work queue. This is why your jobs keep going if you quit Compressor. It’s just a preset manager and job launcher. Qmaster keeps the work queue, and calls CompressorTranscoder to the lifting. In fact, if the Qmaster daemon stops working, you won’t be able to launch any Compressor jobs at all. Not even on “This Computer”.
For some reason, it seems no one has tried to use Qmaster with Blender, or pretty much any other program. Nuke is the only app I’ve ever seen a Qmaster-setup guide for. It’s actually pretty simple once you figure out how it works. It probably would have been easier if this wasn’t my first attempt at distributed rendering.
thanks for this everyone! I do have one question for the Qmaster setup. I want to add in the t- command to set the number of threads…the problem is, some computers have more threads available than others…how do I tell it to use maximum available?
I’m so glad I found this. Gonna try the Qmaster setup soon. Sounds like Netrender is still a bit troubled… Thanks all.
Don’t do anything. The -t command only overrides the setting in the .blend file, which is set to “auto” by default.