"John VanSickle" <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote in message
news:4065ABF4.A37B0EC5@hotmail.com...
> 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.

Hmm... interesting. It's good to hear from someone who actually uses a
multi-machine system in a practical way! :)

Certainly that sounds like a reasonably good solution to distributing animations
across machines, but it raises a few questions:

You say you have ini files to render 12 frames and you give more ini files to
the faster machine, why not simply have one ini file for each machine which
renders more frames on the faster machine than the slow one?

Have you come up with a way of handling scenes that use persistent variables
(e.g. particle systems, physics, etc)?

Have you tried a similar approach on still images?

Have you tried partially automating the management side of things? So an
automated process could watch the frames coming in and farm the next batch out
to whichever machine is currently further ahead.

Still, it sounds like it may be less effort than I feared. Plus it would be very
easy to write a program/script that could automatically generate those ini
files.

-- 
Tek
www.evilsuperbrain.com

Post a reply to this message