Render Farm Query

[Jock]

To date, when rendering I tend to do most things on my one and only computer, but when I'm busy i'll use the likes of rebus.

 

For some time now I've been pondering whether things are fine as they are or I bite the bullet and get a second computer and basically render everything myself, but i'm not entirely sure how its done.

 

So for all the guys who have more than one computer, when youre doing your final renders, do you need to actually archive the file, move it over to your other computer and start the render, doing that for every render?

 

My assumption is that isnt the case as it seems like it would be quite time consuming, especially if say you notice an error and have to do it all again, but at the same time i'm not overly sure how you would do it.

 

I suppose one of the main issues would be your texture library, would you need to copy it on to both computers seperately?

 

Any help would be great as I could do with getting my head round it and if I go with it, get a new computer.

[Tommy L]

If all computers are networked correctly its very easy to set up a drive which is seen from all machines and use this drive as a your job server. Ideally the server is its own machine. Depending on how you like to do things you can either keep job assets with the job file or build a library. I personaly keep job specific assets (lighting caches etc) with the job file and keep assets that would be universally usable (textures and models) in libraries. Both are held on the server. In fact I have very little held locally.

When you submit a job to the farm (either DR or individual frames) the machines all look for a drive on the server and pull info from there. So no, its no more laborious to submit to the farm than it is to render locally once everything is set up.

[Jock]

Apologies as i'm not that clued up on some of the terminology, but when you say a server, does that mean a computer running something different to Win7, I remember the server where I used to work but that had some different form of windows on it. Or does it simply mean the two computers are talking to one another?

 

Also, when you say the server is its own machine, so what, you'd take the current computer, have that as a server off to the side, and use the new one primarilly for working?

 

The above answers may explain this anyway, but If i understand you correctly, you have the two computers wired up and they can both see the drives on each other, for the likes of max you would just have the external file paths all pointing to the same location on one of the computers. So youre working away on the primary computer, get the scene just the way you want, so then you open the file on the secondary computer and simply hit render. That right?

 

Thanks for the help.

[Tommy L]

Yes, a server is just a machine that holds/distributes information to and from other machines. In my case (and potentially yours) it would be a machine that has lots of hard drive space, a backup device (RAID or an external hard drive or both) and thats it. Doesnt need to be fast, doesnt need lots of RAM. Just hard drive space. I just run W7 Pro on it and I have 10 machines. I bought my server for $1100.

 

So if you have one machine now and are looking to buy one node, it would kind of make sense to buy a server also but its not 100% necessary. I say this because once you have the server your whole setup becomes scale-able (you can just buy another node whenever and plug it into the network) and all the processing your workstation does is your project work. If your node is rendering, it is reading from the 'server' drive. If your workstation is the server then the workstation has to dedicate some resources to being a server.

Im a big believer in one job per machine: workstation | node | server

 

When you say 'open the file on the second computer' this is technically correct, but its an automated function. In max you send the file to render via network render and the job is sent to Backburner. Backburner is the render management software that ships with Max. Its extremely easy to use.

[Jock]

Cheers for the help Tom, clears a few things up. Now just need to start shopping.