> > trace frames 0,10,20,30... on PC 1, frames 1,11,21... on PC 2 etc.
> Wouldn't it be simpler to simply trace eg. frames 0-9 in PC 1, 10-19 in PC 2, etc?

Well neither are ideal but the original scheme is better ... a key goal of
distributed rendering is load balancing, that is, you don't want to be waiting
at the end for one machine to finish because it was doing all the slow frames.
SInce many/most animations have some parts that are slower to render than
others, rendering every n'th frame on a machine is preferable.

The best way (optimal load balancing) is to have a server that is spawning jobs
to the clients as each client finishes a frame. In the worst case then you are
only waiting at the end for the length of time it takes one frame to render.
This is the way I do it, it isn't hard to script and there are some free tools
available to do this automatically. If you are luck enough to have a Mac then
just use xgrid that is supplied free with all macs.

-------------------------------------
P a u l   B o u r k e
http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/

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