Tek wrote:
> 
> So, what do you think? What sort of system should I build?

You aren't going to get much better performance out of a single box;
multi-machine rendering is your solution.

Render management on multiple machines is not that difficult.  I have
two WinXP boxes here (one's a laptop).  I have one directory on one
machine shared out, and both machines map it as drive P:.  POV-Ray on
both machines is set to look at drive P:, and all frames are written
to that drive.  This way I have only one copy of the sources to worry
about, and only one place to look for rendered frames.

Rendering itself is done with a set of .ini files, each of which
designates a 12-frame set of frames to render.  When I want to render
a large batch, I load the .ini into the render queues; I give more to
the faster box than to the slower box (about a 3:2 ratio).  When the
frames are all done, they're all in one place and I can handle them as
with a single-box rendering set-up.

Regards,
John

Post a reply to this message