Feature Request: Remote Rendering

Feature Request: Remote Rendering

This is a fairly vague feature request, so allow me to outline my needs:

1. My primary computer is a 500Mhz G3 iMac, with 320Mb RAM. While it isn't exactly a dinosaur, it's not fast... at all. While I have several other computers at my disposal (including an iMac G5 1.8, and a new iBook within a few weeks) which Martin was kind enough to allow me to install Cheetah on with the same license. Sadly, I rarely have physical access to these machines because of various family-based reasons (one of them is with a parent I have very little access to, and so on).

2. While I do all my editing on the 500Mhz iMac, it's much too slow for me to use as a rendering machine. For instance, the original Rose that I posted in my tutorial topic took two days to render on this machine - so long that I wasn't able to go back and fix what I disliked, and simply had to make do with using Photoshop to patch up what I could.

3. Currently, the only way I can have renders completed within a reasonable timeframe is to email or IM the .jas files, and have them rendered on the iMac G5 by my Dad... an extremely poor solution.

And so, I would like to request some kind of functionality, however limited, that would allow me to either take advantage of multiple computers on the same LAN to co-operatively render a single image (a la XCode's Distributed Build ability), OR to allow me to ssh to a remote computer, have it render the scene file, and then save the file uncompressed (as a .mov or TIFF) and allow me to copy it back to my own machine.

This would be a godsend for me, potentially cutting rendering times significantly, and making it possible for me to work with much more complex images.

Perhaps this could be accomplished with a separate "Network Client", or something, that would allow me to run it remotely with a particular set of arguments (as is possible in *nix). I'm not sure if this is possible, nor am I sure if this is even possible right now.

Hope this isn't too specific a requirement for your consideration, Martin. Thanks in advance. =)
 
Re: Feature Request: Remote Rendering

RandyWang said:
Hope this isn't too specific a requirement for your consideration, Martin. Thanks in advance. =)

Hi,
it's not to specific and you are not the first who requests network rendering. But it takes quite some time to make it well. So I wouldn't expect it in the near future.
My main focus is still to itch out more speed from the current (non network) renderer and I already have some ideas to speed it up. Trust me your iMac will get faster. :wink:

By,
Martin
 
Thanks very much, Martin. To tell the truth, I'm extremely impressed with how fast Cheetah runs on this machine at the moment, and if it's going to get faster... eeeeexcellent. :p
 
Question to see if this is worth my time: Has anyone tried parallel processing using Pooch yet? I'll be installing it on three computers at my dad's place tonight, to see if I can get it to run, but I'd be interested if anyone's been successful in the past...
 
Another useful part of the render window would be an indication of the render time or a percentage bar showing the status of the render.
 
Hi fused,
it is very difficult to make a prediction how long a rendering actually takes. For example refractive materials need much longer to render than normal diffuse materials.

The only thing I can show is how many lines have been already rendered. But that doesn't tell to much how long it will still need.

By,
Martin
 
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