free renfer farm

[Equinoxx]

This topic pops up every now and again, and i'm gonna say now what it concludes to every time.

It's not doable.

the sheer sizes of some projects are so huge [talking gigabytes in textures alone] that transfering them across the world takes longer then to render the frames themselves. and then there's the problem of plugins. all people will have to have al plugins installed for this to be usefull. in short, it's not gonna happen.

[JeroenDStout]

...unless of course computers could just send data over to be processed without telling the actual source & purpose. With a fast connection it would work. Sort of networkrendering it would be then.

[LFShade]

The job of, and advantage to, network rendering is that a scene can be split up into pieces to be rendered by a number of processors concurrently. Rendering isn't just about crunching ambiguous numbers from some anonymous source, it involves analyzing a scene - calculating geometry, shooting rays that interact with the geometry, calculating the appearance of shaders that are dependent on lights and geometry, etc. To do the real work of rendering, any processor is going to have to know about all of these bits of scene information. Sure, you could have one machine figure out all the scene information and then tell a bunch of other computers what numbers to add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc., but that would be like handing off the baton on the 99th lap of a 100-lap race:rolleyes:

Those of us who insist that this is not likely going to happen anytime soon aren't just being arbitrary - there are some serious data throughput issues preventing this kind of massively distributed rendering from being viable.


RH

[uzik]

I understand there's a java applet
that runs in web pages that
will render povray scenes.

[JeroenDStout]

You can have normal renderfarms now, no? Don't tell me you expect the internetspeed never to get over the 2gig/s or something... that large scene is sent before you know it to all other computers.
It could just check which computer is available, send the data in seconds (or minutes fine too), and render away.
Easy peasy if you ask me.

(though I'm still on a 5 kb/s connection)

[Iain McFadzen]

Trying to set up a decent sized renderfarm is hard enough when all the PCs are in the same room, and you know which version of which plugin is installed on workstation x, and which script is installed on workstation y, and which drive is mapped to which directory on workstation z, and so on and so on. Trying to do this over the internet on a bunch of PCs you've never ever seen, much less have access to, is pie in the sky.

[TIMTHESORCERER]

we have norton ghost to make sure everything is installed (ghost copies hard drive and installs on other machines, my school uses it and they created an identical group of 500+ machines in less than 3 days all from 1 machine)

[RazzBlade]

all the processors used would hafto be the same, otherwize the rendered images maynot be "exactly" the same shade,

[heavyness]

i've seen render farms mess up images because win2k updates. if this would ever happen, the renderer and 3d app would have to be made from the ground up to support it. sure its possible, but as of right now and the very near future, no.

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