Render Nodes

[Jonathan]

With growing workloads its really time I speed up render times. Im working from an i7 workstation and need a suitable and extendible render node solution. What are the options available?

Thanks J

[Devin Johnston]

I'm not sure what you mean about what are the options, you either purchase machines for in house rendering or you purchase time on someone's farm/cloud. The second option is more expensive and wouldn't really work for a distributed rendering setup.

Edited November 13, 2012 by Maxer

[dande]

As Devin said buy more machines and send your renders to the machines using backburner. You can buy more i7's or Xeons. The cheapest solution is to buy the parts and build the machines yourself. I am looking at extending my render farm From what I can see it's cheaper to buy i7's.

[Jonathan]

Ill still be using a render farm for final animations, (my experience with RenderNation recently was very good) More i7 machines is my preferred choice but what is the best way to get most value from them in terms of removing unnecessary parts.

[Devin Johnston]

The only thing that could be left out is the video card, if you're not doing GPU rendering then just get a motherboard with a card built in. It's also cheaper to go with full sized computers than 1U rack mounted cases because they usually require smaller more expensive components. If you buy 10 single processor machines that's cheaper than 5 dual processor machines in most cases, doesn't sound like it would be but it is by several thousand dollars.

[dande]

I find render nation great but I also find render farms expensive in general because the cost can vary per frame. its a cost that's hard to pass onto a client. That's why I'm going down the route of my own render farm. I'm looking at getting 1u cases and building a rack based system because of space requirements.

 

Devin will a 1u case not take a standard motherboard?

 

My current render nodes I'm just using on-board graphics and a minimum size hard disk because you are just running the minimum of software in my case windows, max, backburner and a few plugins

[Noise]

We have a number of stripped down tower machines which have been incredibly cost effective over the years but, I am interested in looking at something like the product below, does anyone have experience with this type of hardware ?

 

http://www.workstationspecialist.com/rendering_systems/rs-d/

[dande]

Thats a great link Niall. I looked at something similar from boxx a while ago and it was almost €3000. I could build 4 i7's for that and get better performance. I've contacted the people on the link above and it will be interesting to see what price they come back with.

[Jonathan]

Not exactly a farm(!) but I have 2 i7 machines in the office at my disposal. Is there a quick and convenient way to hook them up to increase render times? They are not connected. Thanks

[Scott Dombrowski]

tl;dr: Yes. Install Max on both of the i7 machines (no need to authorize) and hook them up to your office network. DBR works great for speeding up your renders.

 

Longer answer: I use DBR with mental ray all the time. I have two dedicated render nodes in our server room, each is a dual Xeon X5675 with 12 cores for a total of 24 extra cores when I use DBR. Make sure each node is accessible from your main workstation. Then (for mental ray, at least) in Render Setup under the Processing tab, in the Translator Options area at the top, choose Use Placeholder Objects. Then in the same tab, scroll to the bottom and check Distributed Render, click Add, and type in the names of your two i7 machines. That's pretty much it. Hit Render and bask in the glory of all those extra buckets.