Ken wrote:

> How would it work exactly. I don't mean from a programmers veiw point
> but rather as a group of people hooked up to the system from remote
> locations. Would the combined power from all of the computers online
> be used to render one scene or could multiple sessions be running at
> one time and the task shared evenly for all those connected or ?
>
>   Pardon my ignorance of such things but I am curious to know and I am
> sure other lurkers out there might be interested in the details as well.
>

I have a slightly out of date early design doc that gives a high level
picture at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Network/4453/rfarm/

In general, there will be a set of renders in the queue. Clients will ask
for the next render, and will get them in turn. Needed assets (includes,
textures, etc.) will only be sent to the client if they do not already have
it (reduces network traffic). Once the image(s) are done, they are packaged
up and sent back to the specified location. So it is one render per client
computer. However, it is not hard to get each render to be only a strip in
an image as long as no radiosity is used.

At the moment I have a client that works OK with the user getting needed
assets and placing them, then running POV-Ray once all needed assets are in
place. The clients use "transports" that are 'plugins' in a sense. I have
the "user transport", and had done a little on a "mail transport", but now I
am going to do a simple "TCP/IP or HTTP transport" so that things will work
better for a LAN situation. I'm starting with a very dumb server, but this
can be tweaked as needed. (my original server was me, so it was a _very_
dumb server at first)

Part of this is that I'd first be working on areas that I wanted for my
work. But if other people need other areas polished first, I can get to
those instead. But I'd need people who have more than one computer with
POV-Ray, can run Java on those computers, and who would like their own
render farm. As far as the Java goes, I'm keeping to 1.1 for now, so it
should run on many platforms.

Also, my intention is that once I have the code a little cleaned up and out
of prototype stage, I'll be releasing it under GPL.

--
"My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box" - W.A.Y.

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