Thank you, that's some very good advice :)

> Keep in mind that if you want to render radiosity scenes on multiple
> machines (or multiple processors meaning multiple instances of POV)
> you'll have to do a first pass render to get the radiosity render which
> will be used for the final trace.

That's true if I follow the philosophy of running seperate instances of pov on
seperate machines, but surely it would be possible to modify POV to run in some
multi-threaded configuration (say with each ray on a seperate thread) which
could then be farmed out to the different processors?

Has anyone attempted such a thing? Is there software/OS's available that will
let a network of PCs emulate a multi-processor system? I confess I've never
programmed anything like that and I've never looked at POV's source, so I'd be
very curious to know how difficult it would be to do something like that.

> Keep
> also in mind that a multiple-CPU/PC-environment *almost* always means
> more work, both in setting it up and keeping it running (even with
> automated software installation scripts etc.).

That side of things doesn't worry me so much. Keeping my current PC running
takes a tiny amount of my time, and provided I clone my other systems I should
only ever have to repeat the same process on all of them when I need to update
something, which is not really a big problem.

> OTOH, a dual-CPU system could be used for single CPU traces on the one
> CPU and developing scenes on the second CPU, so in that case it would
> improve your workflow.

I don't currently find my workflow is held up too badly by running high detail
renders in the background, since pov's happy to run multiple instances and most
of the time when I'm editing a scene I'm really just using a text editor (my
preview renders are very fast so don't really take much render time away from
the big render). The problem is more that if I'm working on one scene I don't
want to edit it at the same time as doing a hi-res render, because I'll only
start that hi-res render in order to find the errors that weren't showing up in
the previews. i.e. I don't have any more editing to do until I see the finished
image. Hence I want a shorter time from start to end of a render.

> Of course the CPU is not the only thing that'll make your system fast.
> Raid systems for disc access, good RAM, etc. will be important, too, but
> I guess you know that already :)

Yes I do :) I currently have 2GB of Corsair PC3200 RAM running at 350MHz (in
sync with my overclocked FSB), and it made a huge difference to render times.
I've also upgraded to the fastest CPU my motherboard can support, and I'm
looking into getting a striped RAID setup with 2 Raptor drives in the near
future. Although to be honest POV doesn't really seem to hit the hard disc too
much on most of my slow scenes, but it will be good for animations.

-- 
Tek
www.evilsuperbrain.com

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