Second computer in a different location to render?

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

Hi guys,

My brother who lives down the street has a nice comp. Is it possible to split my render animations between my computer and his, even though we are on separate networks?

Thanks,
Mr D

2

I have had success cross-rendering on different machines and even different OS using Blender. So give it a try. You will have to migrate any textures or external files to your brothers machine and make sure they all link back up on his system. The best way might be to simply click the “Pack” texture button on all images then when you get to his system unpack all the images to his system using the File\External Data menu.

3

Hey Atom,

Thanks for the reply. I know I can load the project over there, but I was wondering if I can split the render between the two computers. I suppose I can load the project on both comps and make them render half and half, but the particle animation has random aspects everytime it does the animation, so that’s probably not going to look right!

Mr D

4

You may want to do a separate render pass for just the particle animation, and use the compositor to put it in the rest of the scene.

5

Hi mrd777, it is possible to render over network/internet with the Blender network render system.
Your brother has to know your IP address during the session and set it in his render slave.
You may need to open a port in your firewall/router (default is 8000) to get trough.
This connection is not encrypted, if you need this it is more complicated but also possible.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Performance/Netrender

I never tested this with particle systems.

Cheers, mib.

6

Also if you bake your particles and transfer the particle cache along with the BLEND the randomness should be the same on both machines.

7

Thanks guys. I will def try these methods!