it is possible to make a rendering farm with different systems?

[salf]

Im thinking in setting up a small (pretty small) rendering farm at my home, i work at office and at home i just do small things, but i wanna try this just to test and see how much speeds up things.

 

I'll only try it on 2 PCs, 1 PC (new one) will work for both rendering and managing and the other one (old one) just for rendering, now my question is, is possible to do that with 2 different systems?

 

I mean, both have to be Pentium IVs ?, or 1 could be PIV and the other one PIII (my case)

 

Actually, what about AMD + INTEL, main PC AMD and second PC INTEL (or viceversa), is it possible?

 

Of course all scenarios have the same OS.

[graphix]

salf,

 

Doesn't matter what the machines are, amd, intel, windows 2000 or xp, p1, p2, p3 or p4. All that matters is that they are networked together.

 

A good cheap way of building a renderfarm is to collect all your friends old machines for really cheap and network them together.

 

graphix

[Greg Hess]

Also make sure ALL the systems have the EXACT same version of the software.

 

There was a big problem with 3dsmax 4.2 with the different SSE/non SSE rendering patches and net rendering.

 

Just make sure the software is all the same, and preferabiliy the OS (for troubleshooting reasons).

[schmoron13]

adding on to what greg mentioned, make DAMN sure that all your plugins are on each computer. I went so far as to include the maps on every machine. Keep in mind that on win2k and older versions, You CANNOT save passwords so whenever you reboot any machine, you'll have to "open," ie, type the passwords so that all the machines can talk to eachother. Here at work, I have a p4 as a manager, and 3 p3's, and another p4 set up as a renderfarm, using max 5.1

[AHaidar]

You can save passwords and have a W2K box logon after a reboot. Download Tweak UI and enable "Log on automatically at system startup" under the Logon tab.

[William Alexander]

Salf,

 

Yes it's possible. I started with a wn2k and win98 systems direct cabled with inverted jack plug. Networking connections and protocol interfaces are different on the 2 op systems. I had to use netbios and assign hard IP and DNS addresses to get it to work. Now if you have wn2k and xp it's not so bad, but the interfaces again are different. i.e. you can't find the same dialog box interface and information in the same places.

 

The easiest way to -mirror- the max folders is to copy the plugin folders, map folders to the slave rendering machine. Always before network rendering. Or you can save all none standard maps and such to a job folder that all of your materials are created out of. for a network job, copy that folder to the slave machine.

 

Good Luck

WDA

[salf]

thanks a lot for the help, i know nothing about PCs except to turn them on and off.

 

Maybe Ill try it this weekend, the main PC will be a AMD Athlon XP 1.7, but it will do the rendering also, and the other PC is a Pentium III 450.

 

Both PCs have WIndows XP, and Ill be using VIZ 4.