Respower Render Farm

[Jeff Mottle]

I also just emailed my contacts at MAXON to see what we can do about getting this underway. With C4D taking what I consider to be a pretty sizable chuck of the Arch Viz industry, hopefully they will want to make this move forwards.

[Ernest Burden III]

What's interesting about the C4D netrender function is that it starts with the assumption that you are working off-site, in that it requires IP addressing. I have yet to set it up on my own machines, and I have an unlimited licence. So if a 'farm' had the C netrender client, I should be able to run on all available machines via MY licence, not theirs.

 

If I understood just how it was done then I would have set up my own mini-farm already, which I have not (waste of licence).

 

I would really like to see this idea advance. I can always buy a half-dozen more computers (for a one-man business)...but with an alternative, why?

[Frosty]

Ernest, I will be posting a tutorial shortly on image slicing with the new version of Cinema and NetRender.

[jackb602]

Thanks Frosty, I'll be looking forward to it.

 

Jack

[srek]

Unfortunately, Maxon's net render feature is insufficient for us for a variety of technical reasons that I won't go into for strategic reasons, so some effort is required on Maxon's part in addition to ResPower's to see C4D appear at our facility.

 

I actually contacted Maxon on several occasions to get their assistance in integrating C4D with ResPower, but things always seem to fall through the cracks. I'm still waiting on a demo CD I asked for 6 months ago

 

Hi Early,

please contact me on this

b_marl (at) maxon (dot) de

Cheers

Björn (Maxon QA)

[Tim Nelson]

Here's a question, non C4D related. And its probably really dumb since its late & I can't think right anymore.

 

Say I have a single high res. image I need rendered that would take my computere here, say 10 hours (using Vray). Would it be advantageous for me to have this render farm do it? Basically is there a way to harness the power of the farm for doing stills only?

[dann_stubbs]

Ernest, I will be posting a tutorial shortly on image slicing with the new version of Cinema and NetRender.

 

http://www.renderking.com/25tile.htm

 

this may come in handy - or as an option for your tutorial since the default camera only has 9 tiles. this will let you make better use of larger farms/more cpus

 

dann

[earlye]

Here's a question, non C4D related. And its probably really dumb since its late & I can't think right anymore.

 

Say I have a single high res. image I need rendered that would take my computere here, say 10 hours (using Vray). Would it be advantageous for me to have this render farm do it? Basically is there a way to harness the power of the farm for doing stills only?

 

Not a dumb question at all . We offer a service called "Split Frame Rendering," wherein the farm divides your image into a grid (you specify how tight the grid should be, e.g., 5x5 or 10x10). It is supported on all of our render engines with the exception of Vue. In the case of 3dStudio, we simply use the "region render" option to mask away everything that is not in the current bucker.

 

There are some drawbacks that you need to consider:

 

1) It is *extremely* difficult to predict how long this will take or what sort of speedup you can expect. Even harder than with animations!! What we typically do is offer a free split-frame render at low resolution prior to submitting the high-resolution version. I.e., if you submit a 640x480 render with a 5x5 split, and it takes 5 GHz*Hrs to complete, then we can guess that a 6400x4800 render with a 5x5 split will take 500 GHz*Hrs, because the hi-res version will have 100 times the number of pixels. Even then, though, the cost is difficult to predict, because pixel count is not the only variable involved. See the discussion of GI below...

 

2) Our experience shows that it does not offer a significant speedup for most scenes that require GI. This is because with GI, the radiosity solution / photon map / etc., must be calculated regardless of which pixels are being rendered. In raytracing or scanline rendering, this isn't the case, so more benefit is derived from splitting up into smaller buckets. Steps can be taken to curtail the duplicated effort involved, although I do not yet have enough experience with Vray to know if they are viable solutions. Some examples of possible solutions are building radiosity solutions, caching shadow maps, etc., prior to rendering.

 

3) Our system does not yet reassemble the file. In other words, the output files we deliver is a series of images that need to be stitched together in Photoshop (or similar).

 

The benefit of course is:

 

1) If you do not use GI (E-light is great for faking GI in 3dStudio), can cache the GI solution prior to submitting on our farm, or the render engine you are using uses monte carlo path tracing to get GI instead of radiosity, you can see near-linear speedups. I.e., a 5x5 split could give you a 25x speedup, and a 10x10 split could give you a 100x speedup. Reality will probably fall a little short of that, but it will be astonishingly fast.

 

2) The reassembly can of course be automated. We have several customers that have written Photoshop scripts and do 5x5 splits on a regular basis since their scripts are designed to reassemble at a particular resolution with that split. They'll even submit 3 or 4 5x5 shots to run simultaneously, thereby using 100 computers in the background while they prep the next render. I've heard rumours of success using ImageMagick, but have found its scripting interface a little unwieldy for my taste.

[AdamT]

I gather that the next revision of VRay will have native support for bucket rendering. Some beta testers have already posted screenshots of this in progress.

 

RAM is another thing to consider with split-frame rendering, i.e., you may be able to render a huge image split into multiple panes that otherwise would not render at all due to Windows' 2GB memory limitation. At least that's been my experience.

[Frosty]

this may come in handy - or as an option for your tutorial since the default camera only has 9 tiles. this will let you make better use of larger farms/more cpus

 

dann

 

Very sweet Dan. I note that the 25 tile camera is now a standard object in R9.

I am also producing a few photoshop actions to speed the pasting together process as well.

[earlye]

I gather that the next revision of VRay will have native support for bucket rendering. Some beta testers have already posted screenshots of this in progress.

 

RAM is another thing to consider with split-frame rendering, i.e., you may be able to render a huge image split into multiple panes that otherwise would not render at all due to Windows' 2GB memory limitation. At least that's been my experience.

 

Unfortunately, the bucket rendering requires use of VRay's internal scheduler, which is incompatible with the ResPower scheduler, so our only large-format rendering support will be split-frame rendering for the time being. We are trying to schedule some of our time to work with Vlado to address this.

 

Also unfortunately, Max allocates RAM for the entire frame buffer, even in the case of split frame rendering, so RAM shortages due to the 2GB limit are unaffected for Max. AFAIK, the only render engine we support that does not have this particular issue is Lightwave, because it renders images in smaller segments to conserve memory. [Of course, this leads to artifacts with certain plugins ]

[earlye]

Also unfortunately, Max allocates RAM for the entire frame buffer, even in the case of split frame rendering, so RAM shortages due to the 2GB limit are unaffected for Max. AFAIK, the only render engine we support that does not have this particular issue is Lightwave, because it renders images in smaller segments to conserve memory. [Of course, this leads to artifacts with certain plugins ]

 

Update! We have recently discovered some features in 3dStudio that should allow us to support *ridiculously* large images. I.e., no need to worry about the 2GB limit, at least as far as the output image is concerned.

 

Preliminary testing is positive, but more work is needed prior to officially supporting it. Please contact us if you are interested in trying it out before it hits the street. http://www.respower.com/page_contact

 

Will keep you posted, of course!

[jackb602]

earlye,

 

Do you have any news about Cinema 4D support on Respower? I hope you got the information you needed from Maxon.

 

Regards,

Jack

[earlye]

Do you have any news about Cinema 4D support on Respower? I hope you got the information you needed from Maxon.

 

Unfortunately, no. Bjorne Marle was very responsive and attempted to answer some questions, but we really need somebody from marketing and from product development to join the conversation.

 

I've pinged the individuals Bjorne told me to contact and have not received a response yet.

 

For those who really do want to see C4D at ResPower, please contact Maxon and ask them to be proactive in working to get C4D support on the ResPower Super/Farm. Companies tend to lend more weight to a chorus of their customers than to a single individual asking to team up.

 

Their contact info is available here:

http://www.maxon.net/pages/contact/about_maxon_e.html