Is network rendering efficient and effective? Will I see a major difference in render time? My main system is p4 3g with 2g ddr ram and my laptop is p4 1.7g with 256mb sd ram Is it good enough for network rendering? does vue 4 support network rendering? As far as my knowledge serves I think vue pro comes with 5 rendercow network rendering engines, correct? Is it easy to setup? Experience ppl please shed some light on this matter and beginers give your first take on this subject. Thankyou.

Well I have not used my network with Vue pro yet... But, I have used it with World Builder. Render times speed up more or less by the number of machines, since each takes frames from the job file and renders them. My main machine is P4 2.8 with geforce4256, the nodes are all Athlon 2.4's with 1gb ram and Nvidia onboard chips. Ideally they would be P4's but the expense meant I could get a another whole unit for the cost of P4's so I figured it would be better to have an extra machine. So there are 3 Athlons my main machine and an old Athlon 1.4. As I say speed is much improved with a 24 hour render taking only about 4 hours or so. I also use split rendering to render parts of each frame, not sure Vue supports this. Anyway, with Vue Pro it is easy to set this up (just not working yet). You just have to setup a network, I had problems with XP's wizards so ditched it for 2kpro. Once your Lan is set up you just need to install the rendercows on each machine. When you goto render just select hypervue and you will be asked to add the nodes or search for them. It will then render on those machines. The great thing about Vue Pro is that it will network render stills as well as animation. SO in short I am assumming it will speed up renders greatly in Vue, but due to the release problems I have not tested it. But on all my other 3d apps it increases speed roughly by the number of machines. It also gives you some backup, plus with Vue Pro you can plug in or remove machine hot as it were, during render. Your lap top should work and you should see an improvement. I would read up on networks first and get that setup and tested. It should be pretty easy. http://www.epinions.com/cmd-review-41D6-5C355BF-39FBC8A4-prod1 You really just need a couple of network cards and a crossover cable, you will need a hub if you want to add more than one machine. A network card can be had for 7 or so and a cable about the same. You could use a wireless network but these are pricey and with non job file rendering may prove unreliable. So I would stick with hard wired network. Hope that helps.

yes but dad is insisting on getting a wireless connection for laptop so I will be hooking laptop and main machine vie hib where laptop will be wireless. Does vue pro have problems with wireless?

Well the short answer is I don't know. I have a wireless G setup that I don't use. As I understand it with network renders that use a job file, ie a file is created with the info about the render, then each node renders a frame and updates the job text file on what frame it has done, it does not matter to much since there is little communication, though they both still need to write the finished frame to the shared location. With Vue I don't know how it works, I think different methods need more of a pipe and some wireless networks drop packets etc...Maybe someone else can advise on this. Wireless is certianly far more expensive with USB cards about 50 or so a pop.

Vue Pro supports network rendering for stills and animations. It currently is not working for Windows XP and 2000. <<Arghhhh . . .>> Vue 4 with Mover supports network rendering for animations only. For animations, the more processors the better. Even if one computer is significantly faster than the other, it just means that in the end the fast machine will have rendered a higher number of frames of the animation. Your overall time to render will be reduced by additional processors. Since the Pro Rendercows aren't working yet -- I'm not sure how Pro works with stills. As far as wireless issues, it beats me . . . I would assume it wouldn't create an issue but I'm wired . . .

pro rendercows don't work? but why? and winxp doesn't support network rendering?

Best guess is that E-on got into a bit of a rush to get Pro out for Apple Expo. The folder with the plugins got left off, and the shipped versions of the ProCow are apparently an old build. Updates on the way, per Steve Bell. As for the wireless...It should work. Maybe I'll dig out my Netgear dongle and see if one of renderboxes will talk nicely with Mr Router....

cool thx, lemme know how that goes.

Okay, test done! I now have a netgear MR814 wireless router so friends can do the connection with that, and we have an MA-111b dongle to use. Once the dongle found the router, I added the box it was attached to by name, got a talkback and did a very quick and dirty render of one of the animated skies. The only glitch I encountered was some flickering in some frames, but the RenderCow used has not been updated to the 4.2 level yet. Other than that, it worked great!

I do wireless network renders from time to time, no problems whatsoever. My wife and I each have laptops with wireless connections. Whenever I need that extra "oomff" (and I can pry the laptop out of her hands, LOL!) I'll launch the cows on those as well as my hardwired desktops. They're only 700mhz, but every little bit helps. As long as you have a decent connection, shouldn't be a problem. I usually park the laptops in the same room as the access point so I have 100% signal strength, just in case ... but doubt it's necessary. You can always get a signal booster as well if need be. -Tim