Do-It-Yourself Network Rendering

[stephen2002]

The preformance boost with network rendering is usually only existent when you are rendering out animations. If there was a technology that would allow network processors to be used for single frame rendering WITHOUT tricks (like a muliple range limited camera setup) then network rendering would suddenly become very benificial.

Basically though with two mashines that are so far apart in spec you would probably get 1 frame off the 800MHz for every 3 frames off the 2600. Adventagouse if you are on a tight deadline or just want to get something done a little bit faster.

I'm not a max user myself but I'm pretty sure it has some built-in capability.

[EvilBasterd]

Well lets just say that you have 2 identical system

(P4 2Ghz with 512 GB RAM)

and lets just say you have an animation of 2 second at 25 fps and 1 frame takes about 1 minute to render.

The normal MAX renderer will only render complete frames on another computer so in our case each computer will render 25 complete frames. One disadvantage is however that you can't render stills on multiple computers. This will result in 25 minutes of render time instead of 50 minutes (in an ideal case with optimal network performance)

With the brazil renderer however (and many others ass well I think), you even can distribute parts of one frame and render them by multiple computers. After that the data will be send back to the main render "server" and will be compiled to one complete frame.

Both methods have their pro's and con's but both really decrease the total render time.

[elvis]

at work i built a render farm around 6 months ago consisting of a few AMD athlonMP 2000+ dual processor machines, and our normal dual XEON dell workstations which joined the farm after hours and on weekends to speed up big renders.

when we render our large stills out for posters, the 3d guys typically render out 5000 pixels wide images, which tends to hurt a single machine. we use Single Frame Network Render (SFNR (http://magicm.cgcommunity.com/index.php?page=maxscripts)) to split the large single frames up across the farm.

animations are sent as per normal, only each frame needs to be rendered as a tif, and then recompiled into an AVI at the very end.

it's useful for large jobs. you'll find yourself still doing your mini preview renders as normal on your workstation, but the high-res finals can easily be spat out to the farm.

[dvornik]

Design extention if you can get hold of it lets you do single frame rendering as well.

Use all the computers you can get your hands on to network render. There's no exuse not to. It's free.

[elvis]

Originally posted by dvornik
Design extention if you can get hold of it lets you do single frame rendering as well.

Use all the computers you can get your hands on to network render. There's no exuse not to. It's free.

i found the design extension was good, but didn't include the preview window ala SFNR.

as for your second comment: technically a single max license is "limited" to 9999 render nodes. but good luck squeezing that many into your house! :applause:

[MickyG]

Thanks a lot for everyones reply. For me almost free, but from what you've told me the justification is there.

Cheers!

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