I wish there was a windows program that allowed you to combine the power of several PCs into one. The word "slow" would become obsolete. For instance, if you had 12 of the 3GHz CPU, you could have a virtual 36GHz CPU. I bet nobody would complain about half-a-second renders or 10 second movie renders @ high resolution. I don't think that's too much PCs to have... I think some homes already have several PCs and notebooks and dinosaurs. I'm just suprised, AMD and Intel haven't figured out a way to sell more CPUs yet. Imaginge if you want to build a 6GHz PC today... just buy a PC and two 3GHz CPU (new OS not required). I've heard that the Sony PS3 will incorporate 72 processors in one CPU. The PS3 will engage as many processors as the games may require them.

Home render farms... very nice idea. It's possible with Windows NT (and OS X and other Unix platforms) when you're running Maya and other high-end 3D software. And some high-end PowerMacs are dual-processor. I would expect adding more processors within a single computer to be handy, but software would have to be written to make good use of them, and consumers would have to be willing to pay more.

hi Bryce 5 has a progie called lightning which lets you use more than 1 pc to render an image. I was thinking of linking my 400mhz amd to my 1.4 p4 but I dont think there would be much improvement ;-> Dave

Yea, I wish Poser was like bryce 5 with network rendering. I'm sure (if you do a lot) any speed improvements would help. XP Pro supports dual processors, but it's no good if your software isn't written for dual processors. What a waste. Intel hypertheading is trying to do the same thing but it's so minor, you won't notice it. I think Windows server (cluster computing) does the same thing, I'm not sure nor am I willing to shell out $4,000 to find out. But you'll also need special hardware, scisi drives, etc ... and I'm not upgrading. Linux has a program called... m********* (don't remember rest of name) that allows you to combine PC power. I understand Poser can run under some linux OS ... but never tried it.

Attached Link: http://www.beowulf.org/

What you're really asking for, d4500, is an OS and software that are written to support multiprocessors. They exist, but mainly for simulation work using very expensive multiprocessing computers (like Cray). The software running on these is tailor-made using coding techniques and compilers that understand how to manage code running over multiple processors. Dual processor support is nice, but, as you said, requires OS support as well as application support to be of any use. Actually, 2000/XP Pro are capable of multiprocessor support (more than just 2). Not certain what the limit is - might be 4 or 16 (?). Still, find me a standard PC motherboard that has 4 or 16 processor slots and we can call it the "Holy Grail". I'd love to be able to pool together the power of a dozen computers - I have two desktops and a laptop of my own, plus another seven or eight are being used by the admin as servers, etc. It'd be nice to increase from 2.5GHz to 10GHz or so. The program on Linux lets you set up a machine "cluster". It is called Beowolf - see attached link. The downside is the usual one - how many mainstream apps does Linux run? BYS

In almost every instance, when discussing "network rendering", one is limited to animation frame renders, the frames being divied up between machines by the net render server. Single image renders can only be done on the system doing the render. Someone above mentioned Bryce having an app that'll render an image on a network, but without clarification, this could still be limited to frame renders - let's see. Still, it would be better if the support were general and not app specific. Software support is a bugger, isn't it! Wish there was a way to wedge a driver or app between the OS and the application so that as the process instructions are sent to the CPU, they would be 'interactively' routed to and from a cluster - sort of like a packet system. Nothing like this on a Windows PC, unless you go the expensive Windows server route. I agree about the hardware limitations causing the bottom-line to be the best speed. Unlike most animation frame renders, calculations sent out to a cluster can be interdependent. Therefore, one machine (the fastest, let's say) can be waiting on data from another machine (the slowest), dragging the entire cluster speed down to the mercy of the slowest machine. BYS

HP's netservers are 8-ways I believe...while not standard PC's ...they are very similar. Evo

HP netservers start at $12000! I was just there looking. For that money, I could build 10 2GHz P4 machines (fully stocked). That is why Beowolf is called the "poor man's cluster." All of the commercial clusters are geared towards business clients, not consumers. If you have the money and 3D CG is your profession, than commercial clusters would be the best and most reliable bet. But when you have to chose between a new car and a cluster, well, most of us have to side on necessity. ;0) BYS

hehe, I didn't say they were cheap... However, if you are a proffessional/freelancer, and pressed for time...a quick seach on yahoo or google with the term "renderfarm" pulls plenty of top choice contractor-type farms for your choosing. I would say, that if you aren't independently wealthy, or work for a large corporation, this is your best bet. Evo

If a large group of people over the internet all have the same pz3 with the animation info...every person can render one or two frames and send them to the central source to be compiled. You'd need alot of people on board, but not a lot of skill. -WTB

Beowulf would be nice if it did Poser. Does it?

Does Poser run on Linux? ;) Beowolf appears to be a Linux-only clusterer. If it's supported under FreeBSD, you might get it to work on a Mac (OSX), but then you'll need all Mac computers with OSX. That'd be expensive as well, if it even worked. In the long run, if you are determined to do this yourself, an alternative would be to have Poser on a bunch of networked Mac/Windows machines (although this isn't exactly legal). Then you copy the PZ3 file to all of the machines and set each one to render a "block" of frames as images. Gather the image frames all back to the master machine and create the animation from there. That's the least expensive solution that I can think of if you already have several machines. BYS

I didn't think of that. I don't like jumping from machine 2 machine - messes up the creative flow. It's hard waiting a few minutes while the render is in progress and you can't do anything else (like get the next scene ready to render, or another render). Batch rendering would be okay, but you won't get time to check if each image is what you want or do rerenders. Perhaps the render engine should be a seperate app. Poser could create scenes, while the render app, renders the images. While the render app will require a lot of resources, the Posing app wouldn't.... so both could go exist - but that's what windows is built for... multi-tasking. Running two apps on one PC should be allowed. CL says it would be too taxing on the system. CL recommends 700MHz for satistfactory performance... However, today we have 3GHz (over 4X the power (700x4=2800)), so running two apps on the same PC should be fine.

Yes, you can get Poser and Vue 4 to run on Linux - you'll need Win4Lin by NeTraverse, though ( http://www.netraverse.com ) I've also tried WineX, but that requires a gallong of .dll's copied, and it's unstable. I have not tried Codeweavers' Office Plugin, but I suspect that it may well work (dunno yet - I'll have to test it out, CW does have a free demo, so I can try using that to run it I guess :) ) I use Red Hat 8.0 for all of my artwork nowadays - the latest item in my gallery, at 1.5 million polys and a zillion imported Poser goodies (Dystopia is my bestest construction friend), rendered in Vue 4 in 3.5 hours, at a resolution of 1400 x 1024 @ 240dpi using the "Ultra" setting. :) Never thought of pulling a Beowulf cluster though... I'd have to scare up a lot of node boxes and find a place to stick 'em all first... /P

Excuse me, but the "velocity engine" chip on any Mac built within the last 5 years or so is a supercomputer (and has more power than the Cray... does Cray still exist?). Check out the gigaflops per second. My G4 with dual 450s is 3 years old, and I badly lust after the new ones with dual 1.42 GHz and a gig of ram preinstalled. You can buy them for $2700. (There are cheaper versions, if you only need 1.2 duals.) PhotoShop takes advatage of the velocity engine and the multi-processing power, but it, too is a workhorse of the graphics industry. Carolly

Price isn't too bad for Win4Lin. Is this analogous to Windows emulation on the Mac (damned name escapes me right when I need it)? Is there a list of applications that are known to be stable running under it? (I'm checking the site, so may just stumble on it before a reply ;) ). Haven't heard of Win4Lin before. Know all about WinE (and its derivatives). I mean, ooooh, it can now run Word. Wow... Okay, it's open source, but the darn thing has been around forever. Win4Lin, on the other hand, sounds interesting. The electricity cost thing has me scared - as well as having to scrounge up a bunch of machines. These would have to be systems that only run when large animation render are needed. Cool stuff.. BYS

Win4Lin is a complete rebuild of the old SCO Merge proggie (so I suppose it would be analogous) - it patches a chunk of the Linux kernel so that you get a program that pretends it's Win98 (or WinME) , and uses the real Windows DLL files. I think there's a compatibility list somewhere, but I know for fact that I can get Poser 4/PPP and Vue 4 going on it, as well as Dark Whisper's V3/V2 texture convertor thingy. Haven't tried Rhino yet (I have AC3D and Equinox running native on Linux, but I'm scrimping for Maya 4.5's $450 academic price, which will also run just fine on Linux :) ) Another great setup is Codeweavers' Plugins, which runs all of MS Office, Quicken, Adobe Photoshop (up to 7.0), but I don't know if it does Poser or Vue. It can be had for $60 at codeweavers.org (I think that's the addy) wine, ( the OSS version - www.winehq.org ) can run things like Half-Life and such, but they've shifted towards providing a core for other emulation projects to run with, in return for financial support and reciprocal R&D efforts in accordance with the GNU GPL. /P

Read the "Info" section. Impressive. Hate the fact that it doesn't support Win2000 or XP. I'm a Pro person myself, but do have access (by way of MSDN sub) to any and all Windows versions. Will have to check it out on a test system. ;) Scrimping for Maya academic? You haven't scrimped until you scrimp for Maya Complete Full. I may have to donate a guitar to an eBay auction, especially with my dogs aiding in spending every last bit of money that I don't have to spend. One broke his femur less than four months ago (costing $3500) and has just got mauled during play - no idea what happened (costing $1500). I estimate that my dogs have cost me about $6000 this year already. Literally killing me. Say bye-bye to Maya Complete... Anybody want two dogs? ;0) BYS

Yes Cray is still making computers. They do 315.8 Gigaflops. Quite a bit more than any single mac can do. I think my dual 533 will only do 1.5 gigaflops. http://www.cray.com/

Oh and Poser isn't altivec enabled, so no extra from that.

Attached Link: http://www.3delight.com/index.htm

I don't know if/how it works for animations but Poser can export RIB files which can be rendered in any Renderman compliant rendered. These often have network rendering support built in or available. BMRT was the most popular freeware one but I think it is now payware. There are others available free though. Of course, there are also commercial renderfarms that you can send files to for rendering but I don't know if any of them are set up to handle Poser files yat. I think at one time, someone here was discussing the possibility of setting up a Poser renderfarm. You might look at 3Delight which is free and can be used on a renderfarm. Don't quote me, but I believe that I read somewhere that 3Delight was going to be the render engine in the upcoming DAZ Studio. If so, then Studio may have network rendering built in, though almost certainly not in the free version. Keep your fingers crossed.