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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