Render Farm Tutorial

#1 http://ws9.jobnegotiator.com/index.html

I spotted that site while browsing through the Seti@Home forums. Some great tips there and some pics of some hardcore number crunchers :)

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, from scan.co.uk you can get 5 dual athlon motherboards, 10 2400+ MP processors and 5 gigs of RAM, 5 40Gig hard-drives and 5 network cards for

#2 Neat. Does this mean we can make a render farm and maybe make a better movie than "Final Fantasy?"

#3 that's pretty cool... however I liked Final Fantasy =)

#4 I think it takes a little more then a render farm to make Final Fantasy ;). I liked it too Ian, but I think we are the minority.

Alc

#5 A 5 computer render farm will still take a long time just to render out 10 minutes or so of video, especialy if you have alot of FX in your sceen.

So i don't know about rendering out anything around movie lenght, you may be rendering for a month or more.

#6 "Final Fantasy" was in production for a couple years, with a render farm of a couple thousand units. So, you're right, a feature length film would take up a godawfully long amount of time to render on a five unit farm.

Don't get me wrong, the visuals on "FF" were absolutely awesome, and the voice acting was pretty good. My only complaints wer the storyline, which was a little weak IMHO, and the expressiveness of the character models, which also seemed a little weak. Facial expressions were minimal. Maybe I just need to watch the movie again, but if recall, there was not a lot of variety among expressions, no obvious changes from happy to sad to angry to scared to surprised. Compare that to the cinematic cutscenes you find in "Diablo II" or "StarCraft," where the characters had very obvious facial expressions. "FF" was groundbreaking, I will not deny it, but it could have been better from a story standpoint. But that's why you have sequels. ;)

#7 Render Farms... I've never actually given much thought to mass computers linked together for processing. I've known it was possible but never new how to build one or even what to use it for. I'm going to start looking into them more and see what i can get one to do. It would be fun to at least build one to say you've done it. anyway, thats it for my pointless postt

#8 After looking back through the post, felt it was probably a wise idea to update things, especially since my initial post's link had gone dead. This is a link to a forum thread which discusses the hardware basics of setting up render farms. Thought it might be educational to somebody.

www.cgarchitect.com/vb/showthread.php?t=883

This one may also be helpful.

www.techtv.com/screensavers/answerstips/story/0,24330,2554333,00.html

#9 Don't forget that such a cluster can be used for more than just rendering. What about using distcc for distributed compiles? Or running lighting calculations on a complex level?

#10 I'd have a look at the new Mac G5 Clusters, from waht i've seen a few of those hooked together shoudl render it faster (if you have the cash).

#11 Get Jetfrog or incredibuild and watch your torque compiles run down to 10% or less of what they are now..

distributed compiles are good.. make it your mantra.

Of course, I cant stand the noise, so I dont do it :)

#12 I little bit of info:
Shrek was render farmed. They started with Sun machines (Unix) and needed less expensive machines to finish the movie so they started two programs. One to render on Windows in a render farm and one on Linux. 1/4 to 1/2 way through the Windows port the other team finished the Linux port. Shrek was finished on a Linux render farm. BTW, Next computers was one of the first computer manufacturers to provide network transparent processes. This means it had off the shelf distributed processing. Linux will be including this "feature" in a couple of revisions. Not sure which one they are planning on adding it to, but it should be interesting. This will make render farms more accessible as the programs doing the rendering will not know if they are running on one machine or thousands.

Frank