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Tek wrote:
>
> "John VanSickle" <evi### [at] hotmail com> 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?
The current version of POV-Ray has a bug which causes some memory not
to be freed until the whole batch of frames is finished for a given
INI. So I limit things to 12 frames at a time (that's half a second
of animation, and all of my shots are multiples of half a second in
length).
> Have you come up with a way of handling scenes that use persistent
> variables (e.g. particle systems, physics, etc)?
Everything is calculated in the scene file from scratch for each frame.
> Have you tried a similar approach on still images?
When I do a still frame I generally have the faster machine render the
whole thing.
> 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.
The present method suits my needs.
> 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.
Probably. I have about 200 of the ini files, and the only edit I need
to do is to update the source file. There's probably a way to put
that in the command line and skip the editing.
Regards,
John
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