distributed rendering

[v-tool]

hello people,

 

i have a very short time for rendering an sequence for animation im working on, i have some questions:

i have 4 machines core2duo 32bit and one quadcore 64bit and i want to conect them for distributed rendering, does distributed rendering work with mixing 32bit and 64 bit systems and does anyone know any tutorial how to set up ditributet rendering.

i would appriciate ur help

thnx.

[datax]

For an animation I would not use DR at all, but just backburner to render the frames on all machines.

[braddewald]

I've heard that mixing 32 and 64 bit systems does work, but I've always ran into problems doing this. So much so that I had to purchase a 64 bit OS to get my farm to work.

[BrianKitts]

I've heard that mixing 32 and 64 bit systems does work, but I've always ran into problems doing this.

 

That's correct it does not work with both together. However you can run the 32 bit application on 64 bit machines. So if you have a mixed farm sometimes you have to evaluate if it's worth the speed increase to use the 64bit machines, versus running jobs in 32 bit with more machines.

 

To answer the question of DR for animations, they only DR I use for animations is when calculating an irradiance map. I typically use 4 dedicated render nodes in DR on my machine to quickly calculate the irradiance with 40 cores locally then send the animation out to the full farm through backburner. The exception to this is if you are using the animation prepass mode for moving objects in which case you want to send it out to BB since it can utilize all the machines.

 

To address having a mixed farm when I have large jobs with multiple camera passes, I'll alternate sending jobs between 32 and 64 bit with the 64bit jobs having a higher priority. That way the 64bit machines are always crunching and the 32 bit machines still contribute picking up the slack.