Hey there,
I am working on a project for school and I want to find a way to speed up rendering for animations.
Any tips? I have read about xgrid for macs.
I do have one Macbook Pro (10.6.4)and a HP netbook (windows 7). Is it possible to set them up on the same network and distribute the rendering process?
Thank you!
Unfortunately, Xgrid requires all the machines in the cluster to be Macs. There are plenty of other queue manager out there. One specifically made for rendering will work better anyhow. If you have Final Cut Studio, it comes with one called Qmaster, that can be made to work with Blender if you know the right buttons to push. Looks like this, to be exact.
Having a Windows machine means the little trick of having one box SSH into another to run the job in the absence of a proper slave process for that box’s OS…is pretty much a no-go on Windows.
I think DrQueue can do what you want, but it lacks pre-built binaries. Since you are a student wanting to render on 2 laptops, I’m gonna guess that buying a commercial render manager with proper support for Blender on OS X and Windows is out of the question. Blender 2.5 has a built in netrender mode of some kind, but I’ve never tried using it.
Are rendering out you animation as individual images, such as .exr, to be brought back into blender for post-processing in the compositor or use in another program? If that is the case then what you can do is open your .blend file on each computer and set Blender to use placeholders and not to overwrite files.
Then when you render out your animation, to the same directory, Blender will put placeholder images for every frame it renders. So when Blender sees that there is an image for any given frame it will begin rendering the next frame in the sequence. This way you can use two instances of Blender to render out your animation.
Just use LokiRender.
It is a java based renderfarm. Works like a charm, no extensive setup, easy to use, lacks some usability and features but galore for your needs.
