Does anyone know of a tool that will manage animations across servers
regardless of platform?

I have a small network running both linux and windows and I'd like an easy
tool for parceling animation frames across the network.

I'm thinking of writing one in Java but don't want to re-invent the wheel.

The tool I'm imagining would also allow you to split a single frame across
servers as well.

Thanks.

Post a reply to this message

Hi,

I hope you don't want "tile" or "split" those goodlooking "Mech-Sims".

but even
one part ofthe picture depends on another.

So wheter tiling nor distribution worked when I tried it.

If you want to tile other animations, then SMPOV can be used under Win32.
So you could theoretically make yourself "Renderagen-scripts" under Linus
and you could have
Linux-Clients as well.

I would support you with informations etc. but it doesn't sound easy to me.

--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


"Aerial Bear" <web### [at] aerialbearcom> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:web.3ebdc15a7a57c8a1b01334470@news.povray.org...
> Does anyone know of a tool that will manage animations across servers
> regardless of platform?
>
> I have a small network running both linux and windows and I'd like an easy
> tool for parceling animation frames across the network.
>
> I'm thinking of writing one in Java but don't want to re-invent the wheel.
>
> The tool I'm imagining would also allow you to split a single frame across
> servers as well.
>
> Thanks.
>

Post a reply to this message

"Aerial Bear" <web### [at] aerialbearcom> wrote in
news:web.3ebdc15a7a57c8a1b01334470@news.povray.org: 

> Does anyone know of a tool that will manage animations across servers
> regardless of platform?
> 

http://www.imp.org/impfarm/documentation.asp

We are using perl at the client and ASP at the server.  A new version is in 
the development that will be perl only.  


> 
> The tool I'm imagining would also allow you to split a single frame
> across servers as well.
> 

We avoided it because or the potential for problems with media.

Post a reply to this message

>http://www.imp.org/impfarm/documentation.asp

>We are using perl at the client and ASP at the server.  A new version is in
>the development that will be perl only.

1) Interesting! But source forge indicates no released code yet - what am I
missing?

2) What mechanism are you using to run ASP on linux? Or does linux support
await the all perl version?

>We avoided it because or the potential for problems with media.

Could you summarize these?

Thanks,
ab

Post a reply to this message

Theo Gottwald * wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I hope you don't want "tile" or "split" those goodlooking "Mech-Sims".

>but even one part ofthe picture depends on another.
>
>So wheter tiling nor distribution worked when I tried it.

Well, the animations I'm doing are pretty simple and don't contain
frame-to-frame dependencies. So, I'm just a newbie on that...

>
>If you want to tile other animations, then SMPOV can be used under Win32.
>So you could theoretically make yourself "Renderagen-scripts" under Linus
>and you could have
>Linux-Clients as well.

No, I want a GUI that'll let me control a farm from one place w/o scripting,
and regardless of platform. Using Java/RMI this would be pretty easy - at
least for the kinds of anims I want to do.

It sounds like what I want isn't out there, so I guess I'll finish the
design and knock some code together. I'll post something here if/when I get
something that others might want to examine.

Thanks,
ab

Post a reply to this message

Aerial Bear wrote:
> Does anyone know of a tool that will manage animations across servers
> regardless of platform?
> 
> I have a small network running both linux and windows and I'd like an easy
> tool for parceling animation frames across the network.
> 
Well, I am developing RendView for that job. RendView should work pretty 
well for POSIX boxes and has been tested in Linux networks. 
However, it should not be very hard to port RendView to Cygwin and thus 
have it run under Windows as well. 

RendView has several features -- you may need to hack a lot if you 
want to implement them all in Java. 

Just let me know...
I may consider porting to Cygwin if anyone is interested in that. 
(And also you may feel free to do that and send me the patch. :)

http://www.cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de/~wwieser/ani/rendview/

> The tool I'm imagining would also allow you to split a single frame across
> servers as well.
> 
RendView will NOT split frames. 

Cheers,
Wolfgang

Post a reply to this message

Aerial Bear wrote:

>Does anyone know of a tool that will manage animations across servers
>regardless of platform?
>
>I have a small network running both linux and windows and I'd like an easy
>tool for parceling animation frames across the network.
>
>I'm thinking of writing one in Java but don't want to re-invent the wheel.
>
>The tool I'm imagining would also allow you to split a single frame across
>servers as well.
>  
>

Hi.

I'm just getting back to the POV-Ray world... and the first thing I was 
doing (well, second, but first public) is getting my R-Cast thingie 
system dusted off and working better.

The first versions out will be Java. Next might be others. It's uses 
some basic transfer mechanisms, but not RMI (since openess is good).

Oh, and it will be Zeroconf enabled.  :-)
(It would be Rendezvous enabled, but I'm not up to keeping up with 
Apple's trademark agreement at the moment)


Got anyone who might want to help me beta?


-- 
Jon A. Cruz

What's this? It's almost as though the fates were tempting me to...
Bad fates. Baaad... Naughty fates...

Post a reply to this message

Aerial Bear wrote:
> Does anyone know of a tool that will manage animations across servers
> regardless of platform?
> 
> I have a small network running both linux and windows and I'd like an easy
> tool for parceling animation frames across the network.
> 
> I'm thinking of writing one in Java but don't want to re-invent the wheel.
> 
> The tool I'm imagining would also allow you to split a single frame across
> servers as well.
> 
> Thanks.
> 

I, too, have a renderfarm tool.
http://www.buckosoft.com/bsac/
It's written in C++.  The gui is a browser.  It supports SMP on Windows and Linux.
Right now i'm still using POV 3.1 because i want to custom compile POV 3.5.
My M$ pov 3.1 is thin, command line only; 32bit povdos without the menus.
Linux uses standard povray.
My bsac server is thin too.  900KB runtime memory on Linux and 2MB on Windows;
leaves more memory for POV ;) .

dik

Post a reply to this message

"Aerial Bear" <web### [at] aerialbearcom> wrote in
news:web.3ec0271559c5449b01334470@news.povray.org: 

> 1) Interesting! But source forge indicates no released code yet - what
> am I missing?

Sorry for the long delay.  The code at sourceforge was available in cvs.  
Since then we have released packages for both windows and linux.


> 
> 2) What mechanism are you using to run ASP on linux? Or does linux
> support await the all perl version?
> 

Just the server portion is awaiting perl. The initial conversion should be 
done in a few more weeks.




>>We avoided it because or the potential for problems with media.
> 
> Could you summarize these?
> 

Sorry, I meant radiosity.  Rendering tiles and glueing them back together 
has the potential for introducing artifacts.

Post a reply to this message

Aerial Bear wrote:
>Does anyone know of a tool that will manage animations across servers
>regardless of platform?
>
>I have a small network running both linux and windows and I'd like an easy
>tool for parceling animation frames across the network.
>
>I'm thinking of writing one in Java but don't want to re-invent the wheel.
>
>The tool I'm imagining would also allow you to split a single frame across
>servers as well.
>
>Thanks.
>

Coincidentally, as a personal programming exercise I just finished writing a
frame-splitting rendering farm manager in Python.  The code runs fine on
(and interoperates with) the linux, win2k, winxp, and win98 machines I
tested it on, and I'm sure it would work on the mac if I could only get the
Unix version of pov 3.5 to compile on my OS X box (as it is, I don't know
if it's possible to get Python to interop with the official "classic" Mac
version).

The basics of the operation are straightforward: a job is given to a central
controller server, which then parcels out horizontal "strips" of the job to
rendering nodes.  Output from each rendering node is sent to any attached
viewer clients, which dynamically display the image as it's being rendered
(similar to the normal POV GUI).  All data, including the .POV source and
image data, is transferred via XML-RPC, so the farm can be distributed
across the internet (although you might run into some I/O bottlenecks
there).

For a system to be a central controller or rendering node, it just needs to
have the standard distribution of Python 2.2 or higher (no extra libraries
are needed) and a version of POV that can be run from the command line.
For a system to run the attached viewer client, it also needs the pygame
library.  The source code is fairly small (about 25k total, with comments),
and the framework would be easy to extend to support farm rendering of
animations and many other kinds of distributed batch jobs.

Anyhow, let me know if you're interested... As I mentioned, I mostly did
this just for fun (the last time I actually used POV for artistic purposes
was back when my Pentium 133 was considered 'speedy'), so it's very
unpolished and there's no real GUI besides the viewer client window.  But
I'd be happy to share the source code.

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