here at my school we use teamviewer to remote control and remote work/render on our new render workstation.
with teamviewer on windows you can define a permanent password and it starts as a windows service.
for private use it is free.
You can upload / download files - make use of the mouse and have full access, like you are virtually sitting in-front of the computer. You can also set the screen color to millions so you can see a better result. The screen refresh is quite
nice.
XFree86/xorg has been able to do that since, what, the 80’s?
for commercial and private use it is free.
Just saying…
Haven’t tried to run blender across a remote X connection yet – think it wouldn’t do so well on a wifi connection – but I have played around with other stuff.
that’s nice, and it’s definitely handy to be able to remote login to machines quickly, but you should really invest time in looking for a proper render manager. i know there’s the beginnings of one in 2.5.
an external dedicated app, especially at a school, will gain you lots of things vs starting renders manually;
-priorities
-queues
-automated checking and re-rendering of bad frames
-load balancing
-grabbing free cpu cycles on workstations that are idle
-logs
-dependencies (ones this simulation finishes, start this render,when that’s done comp, when that’s doen create a mp4 and upload it to this website for review)
-email notification
-built-in vnc access
-lots more
get your IT guys on this, can be a bit of work to setup initially, but will save you loads of time in the long run.
Heh, I understand price being the issue, but there’s free ones floating about. I fear your main problem will be getting someone interested in installing and maintaining it. Would still be useful even without a farm, installing the nodes across your workstations would allow renders to run either overnight across all machines or when they’d be idle otherwise.
The problem with free (unlike blender of course!) is you get what you pay for; the free systems tend to be flakey, or difficult to install, or difficult to use, or all of the above. Enyhoo, off the top of my head there’s dr queue, sun grid engine, condor, deadline ( free for 2 render machines), there’s probably more out there.
