Render farm

[onlyfloorplans]

Hi,

I need to set up a render farm for rendering single images made using 3D Max and need some advice:

I have 9 PC's for rendering, all different spec's from P4 to Quad core, all ramed out to the max.
A PC as the render manager with Backburner installed.
1 GB switch.

The jobs we do are one frame, single picture 3D interiors.

My question is: How do we get all machines to render one together. We can set the render farm manager to queue the jobs but, it only selects one PC for each job.

Idealy we want the queue manager to wset all PC's to work on one job then select the next job and have all PC;s working on that....etc.

Any help please...my hair is falling out....

 

[LePhuronn]

ask whoever is supporting 3DS Max how to set up a render farm, or have a look their their forums.

Much more likely to get a knowledgeable response from there.

 

[onlyfloorplans]

Thanks for your advise.......I will do that.

 

[N19h7M4r3]

i dont know anything about renderfarms, but from a logics point, if all are diferent builds you should have some problems setting them all to render 1 frame... how i think it works is that each node will render a diferent segment of the picture, but if all have diferent computing power it should be hard to sync all together, if it is possible you will always have to wait for the slowest node to finish its part... so essentially the only thing thats gona matter is how many threads can be processed at the same time (how many slices of image)

but again i have no idea you should try what he said lol =)

 

[localemperor]

I have a small render farm set up and do exactly what you're proposing.
You have two options;

1) Use Backburner. You're getting only one computer at a time because you have to set Split Scanlines (I think, I don't use the regular render engines) in the Render Settings to have multiple computers work on it at once. Make sure Use All Servers is selected in the Backburner dialog box.

2) Use vRay. vRay natively has multiple computers work on one image at a time through Distributed Rendering. It costs about $900 per license but has been well worth it.

With vRay's recent update, you can combine Backburner and their Distributed Rendering. I've had some mixed results because there seems to be a bug that saves over the last image when batch rendering... Oh well, you can't have it all.

Its really been a time saver for us. We just got four new but standard desktops to make up the nodes, and it has cut down the render times to 1/4 of what they are with a standalone.

Good luck with the interiors. I do both interiors and exteriors and I prefer the latter.

You may want to try posting on The Area or somewhere aimed at 3D graphics.

 

[la_tokoloshe]

think mental ray will also do distributed bucket rendering to spread one image across multiple pcs