Ian <pov### [at] nebulouscorecom> wrote in
news:Xns### [at] 204213191226: 

> Hello,
> 
> This is my first post here. I have been playing with the idea of doing
> a render farm. 

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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