Hi all,

I have a render farm for Adobe After Effects, and I was wondering about a
few things. Perhaps some of you could help shed some light on the
situation. The farm I have is 10 p3 1.3 Ghz plus 9 assorted computers
(corporate buyout, failed dot com...practically stole them) all are loaded
with various windows and *nix oses. The ones loaded with windows are
rendering for after effects, and since they are my bread and butter, I need
them to continue doing so when I have contracts. I am now using POV-ray to
render 3d stuff, and I am only using one machine to do so. I
would like to distribute rendering to ALL my machines and be able to render
a single frame not just a frame per machine in an animation. I am currently
assessing a few different designs, and I hope I can get some input on some
of them. They are as follows:

1. Converting all boxes to linux, and using WINE to emulate a windows
environment so I can run the Adobe rendering engine on each machine, and
compiling PVMpov to render raytrace scenes. I am not sure how well the
adobe engine works in WINE, but I am willing to devote some time to it. I
know this solution will be very popular with you *nix guys ;)

2. Installing windows on all boxes and trying to get linforwin or cygwin to
work to render raytrace, while using native windows for Adobe rendering. I
am not sure how cygwin and povray get along, but again, if the solution is
viable, I would be devoting time to tweaking it.

3. Purchasing VMware (ouch) for all boxes and rendering each in their own
modes. VMware seems to would well with any software I have tried.

I am comfortable with either solution (admin experience) and would be happy
with a flavor of nix or windows (of course the nix solution would be
soooooo much cheaper). If anyone has a solution to this design problem,
please post and let me know, or email me at hazel186 at comcast.net I am
sure there are others out there with the same or similar problem.

Solutions examined and rejected:

pure linux environment (no support for ae rendering if only someone could
port the ae engine!)

pure windows environment (no support for parallel POV-ray rendering)

mixture of both (I have that now! It sucks!)

Thanks to all for reading, and many thanks in advance for those who post to
try and help out.

Mark (POV-ray newbie, computer-and-graphics-ophile)

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Mark,

there is a Win32 port of PVM 3.4.3, check out this site:

http://www.csm.ornl.gov/pvm/pvm_home.html

Also, there is a MegaPOV 0.4 (based on POV-Ray 3.1g) PVM port for
Linux (dunno about general Unix) on Francois Dispot's page, check out
this site:

http://www.wozzeck.net/images/pmp/

I haven't seen Francois showing up recently but he might have just
been waiting for the 3.5 source code release. In any case, if you
think you can help parallelizing 3.5 for Windows and Linux, the
community will be grateful. It is not such an uncommon situation - a
lot of people have Linux boxes around used for routers, firewalls or
development alongside their Windows machines, and you know that every
bit of rendering power helps.

Good luck in your endeavors!


Peter Popov ICQ : 15002700
Personal e-mail : pet### [at] vipbg
TAG      e-mail : pet### [at] tagpovrayorg

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On Sun, 04 Aug 2002 10:09:40 +0300, Peter Popov <pet### [at] vipbg> wrote:

>Also, there is a MegaPOV 0.4 

Correction - it's based on MegaPOV 0.7 (the latest one)


Peter Popov ICQ : 15002700
Personal e-mail : pet### [at] vipbg
TAG      e-mail : pet### [at] tagpovrayorg

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in news:web.3d4c6c2076ae1948634c49e20@news.povray.org Mark21 wrote:

> Solutions examined and rejected:
> 
> mixture of both (I have that now! It sucks!)
> 

Although you rejected it and depending on how feature ritch the distibuted 
system has to be, you could try Warp's approach, maybe with an another 
scripting language:

http://news.povray.org/povray.unix/6173/

Ingo

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