Renderfarm questions -again-

["Rob Wuijster" <rob(at)s-5.nl>]

Hi all,

 

We're looking into a one-and-all solution for rendering -again-, and we've narrowed the choices of software down to a handfull.

But still the entire topic on network rendering is a bit confusing to say the least. After reading the manual on this twice, I still have a couple of questions.

 

We have 1 XSI Advanced 4.2 and 1 XSI Advanced 3.5 license running for the upcoming network rendering thingy... XSI Foundation doesn't do anything in this area, not even adressing satellites, so this one is ignored.

 

With XSI 4.2 I have 4CPU MR rendering and eight satellites/nodes/tokens/CPU's available for rendering. Also XSI 4.2 comes with an XSI Batch license of some sort that has a 2 CPU license as far as I can figure out from the docs. With XSI 3.5 this would also be the case, a 2 CPU license.

 

So to add this all up I would have a total of 8 MR CPU's and 8 satellite CPU's to render with, right?? But I cannot use the 3.5 2CPU license to render 4.2 scenes, or can you use all licenses for both versions of XSI??

 

So to add on this, how to set this up. For the satellites I have to install distributed rendering on the slaves, so I can access the satellite nodes from within XSI or dump a script on the XSI command line window. I cannot use the additional MR CPU licenses to add to this pool as far as I understand. The documents are contradictary at most here. For the standalone distributed rendering I have to rely on my MR CPU licenses, so that would be 8 CPU's.

That I could pipe into the renderfarm software.

 

If anyone can fill in the blanks here, and/or correct the above, and maybe a short list how to start with this would be much appreciated. We're looking into a renderfarm solution that does also 2D (AfterFX, Combustion, Digital Fusion) like Royal Render, RenderPal etc. so maybe people want to share some insights on setting this up with the two mentioned here.

 

All replies much appreciated,

 

rob wuijster

s-5 multimedia

holland