Rendering

[bigfatMELon]

I guess that might depends on whether you think Chevy engines are better than Fords. Personally, I wouldn't equate any of the mentioned renderers with machines of such poor quality. ;)

However, RenderMan and Brazil offer feature sets that are far in excess of Maya's built in capabilities. Whether anyone should choose them is a matter of need.

For instance, as good as I think Maya's renderer is today, it's no match for the quality, speed and open ended flexibility of RenderMan. In a film production environment, it would be difficult to not want RenderMan, MR or something similar. And if GI is a must for you then these other renderers have it and Maya doesn't. Makes that choice pretty obvious.

I find that Maya's renderer is very capable, a bit slow but surprisingly flexible. But I wouldn't put it in the class of the top five renderers out there. Spending a little time researching what each of them offers and why the facilities that use them choose to do so will help make it more clear.

-jl

[nuglops]

I'm curious to know what people's opinions are of distributed network renderding applications. I'm getting ready to setup a small render farm of two or three machines and would like an experts opinion I guess you could say.

From what I've been able to gather, these are some of the dominant ones. If you can think of any that I am missing, please let me know.

Many thanks,


- Smedge http://www.uberware.net/smedge2
- Spider http://www.stationx.com
- Lemon http://martin.ice.org/Pick_A_Lemon.html
- Render Max Lite http://www.rendercorp.com
- Muster http://www.vvertex.com (also do rendering on IRIX clients from its NT dispatcher...)
- DRender www.audiomotion.com
- Rush http://www.3dsite.com/people/erco/rush/
- LSF: heavy duty load share management software LSF = Load sharing facilities www.platformcomputing.com
-SEB www.pmc.it/darkside/surfolo.html
-Boxx is producing a plugin to ship with their hardware www.boxxtech.com/

[Waboflex]

You missed Dirk Bailluch's Frame Booster:

Go here. (http://dirk-bialluch.mayaring.com/mel/html/tools_free.shtml)

Look for Frame Booster in the Rendering section. And it's free.:thumbsup:

Can't really give you much advice, we're looking at using a load of now-redundant workstations as a render farm, but we've not gotten round to it yet. I'd suggest getting as many demos as you can and trying them all, see how they go.

That's what we're planning to do anyway, when we find the time...

Wabo.

[beaker]

I used Rush at the last job I worked. I thought it was a pretty nice app expecially since it runs on all platforms that maya runs on. We were running maya on linux, windows and irix. Also alot of it is written in perl so you can use it to que up jobs for any renderer out there that run through the command line. We had it running Maya and Shake jobs at the same time. Also there were included job submit scripts for Prman and Bmrt.

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