Last year I had some fun with POV-Ray animation. The main aim was to find some
(any?) way to utilise my mini-farm of PCs.
The main result of that time can be seen at: https://vimeo.com/242598466

The subject was chosen to fit a piece of music by a Heavy Metal band (they're a
lot heavier than this piece). The Chess is NOT the greatest of contests but it
fits. (No Chess experts please!)

Python 3 was used to generate the POV-Ray pov/ini files, with most of the
parameters (timing, start/end distances) pre-generated in a spreadsheet. Some 50
pov/ini scenes were then farmed out in separate frames. The total number of
frames is ~1700 for ~1:50 secs of animation, including fillers and titles. The
final render session took ~25 hours, and the frames and soundtrack were finally
sewn together with ffmgeg at 25fps.

The render farm is a mix of i7/i5 PCs (and recently a couple of Ryzens).  At
full tilt, that's pumping out over a kilowatt and perfect for a cool winter's
day. The master (Gru) is Win10 while the clients run Linux Mint (the
"Mintions"). The home-brew render job management is a bit of Python using
UDP(!!) over the gigabit LAN.

tery

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