> There are several existing projects that I know of out there.

When I started with SMPOV i found nothing that was as simple as I wanted it
for myself.
WEB-based management ? http-communication ? cross-platform ?
I did not need that, others would like to see that. I have only Windows
here.
Not for philosopical reasons (have no problem with Linux) but for practical
reasons (work).

What I needed was in short:
- drag a ".pov"-file onto a program
- the POV-Ray on all PC's start up rendering
- have the resulting picture in the same folder where the source file was
originally.
- 1,2,3
So this was my "basic thought". Want to share it at this place.

>it frame by frame.  Anything else gets really complicated, really buggy,
> really fast.

Buggy ? That maybe true if you use these "WEB-technologies" (maybe).
For me the tiling works fine for SMPOV so long you keep distance from scenes
that use
Radiosity or those sweet mechsims..
You cannot tile them or lets say "You can but the resulting
pictures/animations are just funny".

Basically the "tiling" is the only chance to save time using the "standard
unpatched POV 3.5"
rendering ONE single picture. So I can say it works really fine for me.
If you don't use tiling, you can "only" distribute frames.

Basically what SMPOV does looks like that:
- get a ".pov"-file
- put a copy of it into the "shared folder" (a folder where all the clients
have access to)
- put a "signal-file with a job-description there"
- start a thread that waits that this job is done

on the client side the render-agents do this:
- wait for "signal-file with a job-description there"
- read it and correct pathes (for the POV-Ray executable)
- start the render-job and place a resulting ".bmp" into the COM-folder
- delete the "signal-file with a job-description" and make ".rdy" file
instead to tell SMPOV "the tile is ready"

Now SMPOV (the thread ...) finds the ".rdy"-files,  counts them if ALL tiles
are ready. If so:
- starts PicPend.exe which "puts the tiles together to a single picture" and
also
- deletes all temp-files
- copies the resulting bmp-files to the original folder (where the
".pov"-fiile was "dropped from".

Other features are:
- distribution of frames (render without tiling)
- support for MEgaPOV 1.0

Currently there is no "controll-panel" to controll the clients from the
server. I have all my PC's in the same room so  I did not need that :-).

Thats in short how I wanted it and I could not find it so I did it myself.
Not WEB-based, cause I only wanted to render locally.

However I'd myself switch to any other sollution if it works better or is
easier. Just cannot
tell you at what point.

Oh ... and Ian Clark (See first post of this thread) got it running now !
And he sent me a new corrected text for SMPOV which is now included in the
package. Maybe you try it on anythig that does not end with "x" :-).

--Theo
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------
Distributed Network-Rendering or Local SMP-Rendering on all CPU's you have.
With SMPOV und
POV-Ray 3.5. & NEW: Mega-POV 1.0 * Download free at:
http://www.it-berater.org/smpov.htm

> There are several existing projects that I know of out there.  A summary
> of them is at the end of this reply.  I would suggest starting simple. Do
> it frame by frame.  Anything else gets really complicated, really buggy,
> really fast.  Based on the work I have done for the Internet Movie
> Project I have boiled the process down to this:
>
> The server just needs to do three things.
>
>     1) Issue frames
>     3) Track frames( Preferably in a database)
>     2) Receive frames
>
> The client just needs to do three things
>     1) Get a frame
>     2) Render a frame
>     3) Return a frame
>
> Our design goals are:
>
>     * Cross platform client/server
>     * http communication
>     * web based management
>
> Obviously the devil is in the details.  Both Gimli and IMP have made the
> source available if you want to see what has been done.  The server
> portion of IMPFarm is still two ASP pages.  They are being converted to
> perl.  If you want to join the IMPFarm project just sign up. You can see
> the work we have done so far if you look at
>
>    http://test.imp.org/impfarm/
>
>
> Tom
>
>
>
>
> POV-Ray RenderFarms
> =======================================
> IMPFarm
>     Language=Perl
>     Renderer=POV-Ray
>     http://sourceforge.net/projects/impfarm/
>
> Povray Render Server(Gimli already replied to this thread)
>      Language=Perl
>      Renderer=POV-Ray
>      http://www.psico.ch/index.php?page=prs
>
> The PVM patch for POV-Ray
>      Language = C++
>      Renderer = POV-Ray
>      http://pvmpov.sourceforge.net/
>
>
>
>
> Non POV-Ray projects
> =======================================
> BORG - BORG Open Rendering GUI
>      Language = Java
>      Renderer = Renderman compliant
>      http://www.project-borg.org/home/index.html
>
> RenderFarm.NET
>      Language = XML
>      Renderer = Maya
>      http://www.renderfarm3d.com/
>
> And these projects on source forge look dead:
>      http://sourceforge.net/projects/renderfarm/
>      http://sourceforge.net/projects/littlefarm/
>      http://sourceforge.net/projects/barf/
>
>
>
>

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