Hi there to all you cinematic povhicons.....

I'm following this project with growing interest and like
to add my 2 cents..

Observations:

First of all I think that all the enthousiasm is a good thing
but it can be a bad thing for such a project if it is not 
chanelled properly. I we are to produce a feature-length
movie, it has to be GOOD in every respect so we should take
time to considder several things. Organizing the project in
groups for diferent tasks is a good start tmo.

The IRC-thing is nice, but here in Europe we pay our telephone
connection by the minute, so I (for one) like to keep my
connection-time as short as possible. IRC is therefore not
a good choice. I would vote for a mailing-list with moderated
subscription so that only participants can discuss on it.
We could open a second mailing-list that takes no messages
from subscribers but to send out weekly digests from the other
list to everyone who do not want to participate directly but
likes to follow the project from the "outside".
I do have my own server and will be glad to host those lists.

About the name "render-slave": Large render-jobs are done at a
render-farm where lots of machines are connected in a network to
do the job. Therefore what we are using will be a "virtual 
render-farm". So maybe "renderfarm participant" will be a good
name.

Idea for the movie:

A good movie is based on a good screenplay which is in turn
based on a good story with karakters that has karakter.
What I mean to say with this is that we need some kind of
personality's in the story ti drive it, otherwise it will
just be a long documentary about ray-tracing.
There is already stated that we can not use human figures 
because they are hard to model on a quality-level but
we CAN use human-alike figures. If the project adopts a
scifi theme for the story (my favorite too) we can use 
cyborg-like semi-humans. They have the outside look of some
kind of robot but human brains inside that has _karakter_ .
Take a look at some manga-movies to see what can be done with
this.

What about me:

You can count me in for now, but I have no idea how much time
I can free up at this point. I have some cpu-time available
for pure rendering that I donate.
Besides this I have a small music-studio that might come in 
handy for sound-edit and syncing. (I have a midi-setup with
80 midi-channels and smtp-sync in place, and a 8-track tape
recorder for pure analog recording). If you need more info
on the studio or my computer-setup, let me know.

Peter.

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Peter Willems wrote in message ...
>About the name "render-slave": Large render-jobs are done at a
>render-farm where lots of machines are connected in a network to
>do the job. Therefore what we are using will be a "virtual
>render-farm". So maybe "renderfarm participant" will be a good
>name.


Yeah!. "Renderfarm participant" is a bit akward though. So for now I settle
for "Render-Farmer" - until something better comes along.
At least we are done with the bad "Render-Slave".
Please everyone: Use "Render-Farmer" from now on :-)

Johannes.

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> Yeah!. "Renderfarm participant" is a bit akward though. So for now I settle
> for "Render-Farmer" - until something better comes along.

Hey, every farm needs some cowboys, how about render-cowboys. I could be the
lone star... ;-)

//Hans Wachtmeister
Render-Cowboy...

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Hans Wachtmeister wrote:
> 
> > Yeah!. "Renderfarm participant" is a bit akward though. So for now I settle
> > for "Render-Farmer" - until something better comes along.
> 
> Hey, every farm needs some cowboys, how about render-cowboys. I could be the
> lone star... ;-)
> 
> //Hans Wachtmeister
> Render-Cowboy...

Well, for the system I was programming (simple POV-Ray render farm), I
came up with "Farmhands" as one of the terms. Saves two syllables.

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Any one knows about the famous belgian cartoon cow-boy karakter ?
I'm talking about Lucky-Luke.
Not a mickey mouse anyway ;-)

Al.

Hans Wachtmeister wrote:

> > Yeah!. "Renderfarm participant" is a bit akward though. So for now I settle
> > for "Render-Farmer" - until something better comes along.
>
> Hey, every farm needs some cowboys, how about render-cowboys. I could be the
> lone star... ;-)
>
> //Hans Wachtmeister
> Render-Cowboy...



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>> > Yeah!. "Renderfarm participant" is a bit akward though. So for now I
settle
>> > for "Render-Farmer" - until something better comes along.
>>
>> Hey, every farm needs some cowboys, how about render-cowboys. I could be
the
>> lone star... ;-)
>>
>> //Hans Wachtmeister
>> Render-Cowboy...


One thing that could cause a prob with the render-Farm(er) idea is the
random routines that are used in the textures built into POV. If I remember
correctly, there is a comment about using different OS/machines to render
frames - then putting them together, because the textures may not match up -
due to the different way the random numbers are generated.

Just a thought.

Fran.

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> One thing that could cause a prob with the render-Farm(er) idea is the
> random routines that are used in the textures built into POV. If I remember
> correctly, there is a comment about using different OS/machines to render
> frames - then putting them together, because the textures may not match up -
> due to the different way the random numbers are generated.

Good point!
We have to make sure that all continuos scenes are rendered on the same
platform (I don't think that there would be a difference with for
example two boxes both running Win-POV-Ray, would there?)

Johannes.

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Johannes Hubert wrote in message <355DD46F.951228E1@algonet.se>...
>> One thing that could cause a prob with the render-Farm(er) idea is the
>> random routines that are used in the textures built into POV. If I
remember
>> correctly, there is a comment about using different OS/machines to render
>> frames - then putting them together, because the textures may not match
up -
>> due to the different way the random numbers are generated.
>
>Good point!
>We have to make sure that all continuos scenes are rendered on the same
>platform (I don't think that there would be a difference with for
>example two boxes both running Win-POV-Ray, would there?)
>
>Johannes.

Not that I know of. I have rendered anims on 486's and Pent's all running
Win95 and that worked OK. Also a mixture of dos (under win95) worked ok as
well. I haven't tried a mixture of other machines thou.


Aside of that I've here what I can provide to the project.

Rendering power - Pentium 150 (48Mb Ram) win96 that spends all night off.
Unlimited access to the Internet - thou only though a 33.6k modem - but at
least it's a flat rate.
CD - writer - Don't know how much that would help.
Some animation experence - see
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/8549

Fran.

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>>Good point!
>>We have to make sure that all continuos scenes are rendered on the same
>>platform (I don't think that there would be a difference with for
>>example two boxes both running Win-POV-Ray, would there?)
>>


Actually, as far as I know, the random number system that Pov-Ray uses, is
identical from platform to platform, so if you render a scene on Linux, then
render it again in Win95, it should come out the same.

I'll test and find out in the next day or so.

Twyst=====================================
pov-ray news, reviews and tutorials
http://twysted.net
e-mail: twy### [at] twystednet
==========================================

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Fran & Melissa wrote:
> Aside of that I've here what I can provide to the project.
> 
> Rendering power - Pentium 150 (48Mb Ram) win96 that spends all night off.
> Unlimited access to the Internet - thou only though a 33.6k modem - but at
> least it's a flat rate.
> CD - writer - Don't know how much that would help.

A CD-RW drive might be a better way to ship the rendered Targa frames to
a repository. (Better to use reusable CD-RW drives; the disks can be
returned to the sender with the next rendering "assignment", although
"assignmnets" are best picked up from the net.)

I'm just looking in and that thought came to mind. I probably could act
as a renderer; my POV-Ray skills are very limited with regards to
planning scenes. Better for me to provide some CPU cycles to rendering,
but it'll have to compete with the RC5-64 challenge :-).
-- 
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