How Do you: Network computers together to render

[bpileggi]

I've heard of other offices pulling off this Seti-at-home thing where all the computers in the office are networked together in a way so that they can multiply their processor power times the number of computers they have to get REALLY complex renders done over the course of a few nights.

Now what I'm thinking of is when the situation comes about where I need to render out an animation to this level. If one pic takes 1-7 hours, at 20-30 fps, a 1-4 minute long marketing video would be 1200-50400 hours. I've gotta find a way to make this happen.

[fluke73]

How Do you: Network computers together to render

Hey... I would love to borrow others computers power and still make the rendering happen on on the main computer who has the render engine... that sounds like an interesting idea! That way you just need one licence - i wonder if that is doable. From what i understand today with networkrendering - it renders one picture per computer and you need a licence on each computer then. I might be wrong.

The other thing - you should look into making the render more optimised for animations maybe you don't need all the details as you need in a still. And cheat alot like pre-render lightning - like you pre-render surfaces with baked shadows and other stuff.

[joe_b]

How Do you: Network computers together to render

In the case of animations there is a solution for Sketchup. You can just set up several different machines( assuming you have several machines ) to render different pages of the animation. Since we don't have true distributed/network rendering available at the moment that will be the best solution.

So you would just do the following
1. Make sure your animation is broken into several pages
2. Open this same file on all of the machines you wish to render (local copies will probably yield faster render results )
3. In each local copy disable all the other pages that you don't want this given machine to worry about ( uncheck "Show in slideshow" in the page manager )
4. Setup V-Ray to render the animation ( I'll go into more detail on this after beta 3 is released and everyone can see the options )
5. Render

So machine 1 would render the transition from page 1 -2 and machine 2 would render from page 2-3 and so on

[bpileggi]

How Do you: Network computers together to render

Thanks Joe. Is that something we could perhaps put in the wishlist? Because even single jpegs are proving resource intensive on my machine. (just found out I only have 1gb ram at work ) I have a scene with a building, Civil has done another one for the site plan and now we have a fully 3 dimensional space of what it'll look like (Trees bushes and all their polygons included). I tried to Render over the weekend for a presentation on Tuesday to find out my comp refused to do it, lol.

[joe_b]

How Do you: Network computers together to render

distributed / network rendering is something that doesn't really need to be on the wishlist - we know we need it

So the file your trying to render - is it just crashing when it runs out of memory? Perhaps you could let me take a look at it for you - it could be an error on our side. We'd respect any confidentiality about the scene file itself. If your interested let me know.

[bpileggi]

How Do you: Network computers together to render

Sure. where do you want it?

[han3d]

How Do you: Network computers together to render

material lockdown and encrypting options might help on rendering renderfarms
or any other confidential issues

[joe_b]

How Do you: Network computers together to render

Sure. where do you want it?

upload it to ftp://ftp.asgvis.com/incoming - then shoot me an email and let me know which file it is. Please make sure it has whatever supporting textures/etc. Thanks

[han3d]

How Do you: Network computers together to render

if no distributed rendering vray cannot be used in big scale animation films

[fluke73]

How Do you: Network computers together to render

han3d: Well i don't think Vray for Sketchup is intended for "big scale animation films". Since for now it's only pages and transitions that are animated. You can't really animate a car or for that matter a car moving and then it's tires spinning for instance. Maybe version 6 of sketchup has some suprices - but then also Vray for Sketchup most likely will be updated as well. I would guess same thing is for Rhino - if im not misstaken - both these programs from the beginning are modelling software and not a complete suite like 3DS max - hence the difference of the priceing.

Correct me if im wrong

[fluke73]

How Do you: Network computers together to render

I just had a hell of an idea - though, i don't know if this is thought of before, but here goes:

This idea should solve som licensing issues as well.

WHAT IF: You install sketchup and vray on one computer. You model the whole scene, set up the stage and animation and so forth. Then when you're ready to render you select the option to render on more than one computer (no network thingie), it will ask you how many computers and what type of system (WinXP, Linux or os X for instance). Then what it'll do is to bake the scene, textures and the render engine into a executable file. Then you will end up with files you can put on other computers. What this file will do is render the amount of frames that are baked into it and and produce a set of images. The file itself really show no interface just a progressbar saying how much is done and so on. This file could even be just a thing you run in the prompt. It just saves the images in that folder where you run the executable.

Is this doable? I would love to have it this way, then i could just borrow any computer over night and just run this file. Nothing has to be installed on the computer that i borrow Hell - i could then just go into an internet caf? and set one file on each computer to render over night. Or borrow the computers that are in the office of diffrent departments.

What should i do with this idea? Post it to whishlist? Is this an old idea? Has any other renderingsoftware thought of this before?

[joe_b]

How Do you: Network computers together to render

I'm not sure of the logistics - but we are discussing how this stuff will work out. Ideallly we'll just move forward and get DR/NR working - which we need to do anyway. For any alternatives they should be things that can be setup quickly just to hold us over until NR/DR is ready - and I'm not sure if that alternative would be quickly developed or not. But we do need to look into this