Hello,

This is my first post here. I have been playing with the idea of doing a 
render farm. My current thinking is to use cgi (perl) and a central server 
that keeps track of some basic state information. The POV scene uses this 
state information to render it's animation. So far I have two state 
schema's. One is a simple TIME variable that is incremented on each request 
to the server. 

The second is a sequence/duration thing. The state is maintained in a .inc 
file that looks like this.

#declare sequence_array = array[2,3,2]
#declare sequence_current = 2;
#declare sequence_index = 2;
#declare sequence_status = 'complete';

Each call to the server increments the sequence_index. When a sequence_index 
> sequence_array[sequence_current] I reset the index to 0 then increment the 
sequence_current. What this basically comes down to is a "what time is it?" 
thing. 

I use will be using perl to call the server. The server will return the 
state.inc file (as text) and the render client will use write this to it's 
local copy of state.inc, then shell out to pov to render that frame.

There is an enlist phase in this where a render client get's information 
about the project which includes things like:
> Where to ftp the result file.
> The project file list.
> other things the client would want to know.

 ---> What do YOU do? < ---
There are lots of folks out there coding POV scenes and lot's of ways to get 
the job done. It would be very helpful to me if you guys gave me some input 
on how you approach the state problem. For instance you might say "I use the 
interpolate function to determine where my objects vector is and use Clock 
to calculate where I am at any given time." In a case like this the master 
server might simply increment the Initial_Frame (which is like the first 
schema) I mentioned.
 ---> What do YOU do? < ---

Anyway..

I thought I would check around to see what kind of info I could find and 
found this link:

http://www.badcheese.com/~steve/index.php?page_title=Povray

Pretty cool. It delivers the product in a very simple way.

Many of the links I visited were defunct.. mia.. 404. I know about the linux  
binary distribution and have a linux box but I am interested in a cross 
platform thing.

Anyway, to get to the point. I have spent a lot of time looking here and 
thought I would post to see if anyone knows of any good render farm projects 
or links. Also, has anyone here approaced the problem themselves and if so, 
can you tell me a little about your project? Can you elaborate on the  
---> What do YOU do? < --- section?

Hope this is clear.

cheers.

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