network rendering

[magzimus]

hi folks,

 

i need some advice, here in nigeria africa where i come from there's no dual processor pc available so i have a core duo laptop and i want to network it with my old p4 desktops (2 of them) will that improve the performance of my rendering? from after effects, cinema 4d. thanks

[Architon]

you can share the workload among computers, the term is rendering farm

heres a LINK i found usefull when i built it.

hope this helps you

[AJLynn]

I don't know about After Effects, but Cinema has ways to do this. There's Net Render (look it up in the manual) which can send frames of animation to multiple computers. To use more than one computer per frame, that's more difficult, FinalRender for Cinema does it automatically but for Cinema's render modules you would need to use a trick that involves setting up a camera for tiling then combining the parts in Photoshop or a similar program. Frosty posted instructions here: http://www.crucialperception.com/free/tutorials/image-tiling.pdf

 

If you're looking for dual-processing power with limited options, I highly recommend a Core 2 Duo, assembled yourself with a 3rd party motherboard like an Asus P5B Deluxe or similar, with a good heatsink and fan, that you can overclock the crap out of. I've got an E6400 on an MSI 975X board (I wouldn't recommend this particular board because I've had issues with temperature monitoring) overclocked to 2.84GHz, and it's so fast it can even run Maxwell Render.