After more tweaking and poking than I've had energy for lately, I finally got my rendergarden functional with VuePro! Whew.... Apparently the Cows were developed with the latest updates in Win2k in mind. All four garden boxes were allowed to run the full Windows update, and I went in and selected the appropriate driver updates, and the Windows 2000 specific updates that did =not= involve DX-9b and Media Player (make sure to get any fix involving the root acceptance, and CPU conflicts or hangs with multiple processes running). After doing the multi-reboot shuffle, I confirmed that the ProCow was starting up on bootup, and re-ran the updater (one of the patches involved issues that could have allowed the patch to run but not fully 'take'). The one thing I did that was different that usual was to add each Cow after the one based on my main system had started rendering. The scene loading times for each were about the same; however, it took a good 2-4 minutes for the textures to load. And it is a good idea to plan on setting the virtual memory to a minimum of 2 gigs, so you have the room for all the textures. And since it is finally working, here's what my little garden looks like (my desk and main system is out of sight to the left. Have a bit of cleaning to do before I show -that- to anyone... :P ). You can't really see it clearly, but that dark box over the colored NIC cables is the KVM switch...don't both with what's at Best Buy or CompUSA; scrounge about on pricewatch.com. I paid exactly $40 for a 4 port KVM switch, fully digital, with keyboard hotkey switching. Which beats the Belkin equivalent at $200, wouldn't you say?

A frame out of the first successful test animation. That's Koshini, Judy Plus, and Nia (the latter two with high res textures), and I got a 550 frame animation @30fps in 1hr 06min on default final setting. Obviously higher settings and more objects would increase that, but it's a start!

Hi Dale, Thanks for sharing it with us (the future gareners). :-) Looking at that picture first, for a moment I thought you must 8 feet tall to look at that monitor. :-) You mentioned you using a switch, do you think a router will work as well? Regards. nish

The monitor is an old 14" monster, and one I would really like to replace with a cheapy TFT, but it does the job (but it would do it better if I could tilt it downward about 30 degrees....) You should have no trouble with a router. The actual connections I use go like this: The mentioned KVM switch is to allow one keyboard, monitor, and mouse to control 4 seperate computers. The garden. Under the KVM switch is a Linksys 5 port switch (about $20 at CompUSA). The uplink line connects to an unused switch port on the back of the Netgear gateway router that connects the cable modem to the other computers in the house (so VuePro is talking to the Cows through 2 switches). And since the house router is 802.11, I've tested the Vue4 RenderCow by wireless (a USB dongle), and it worked just fine, so the wi-fi crowd can play too... And I've tested both the Netgear wireless router with 4 port switch, and Netgear RT314 gateway router, and neither cause Vue any distress. Just be sure that all the security features are enabled. Most AV software doesn't like the RenderCow setup, and needs to be disabled before you start a render session.

ah, cool. thanks for the info. The precausion is only for the AV or also for the Firewall? I always wonder is there a way to set up two computers to render one picture? (probably in animation you would call it "one frame") But, that single picture is not for the Mover, but for the Vue itself. The concept here is, simulating the speed and memory of two PCs, to render one picture and get the job done in half the time. You know it certainly helps when the picture is going to render for 12/13 hrs. :-) Would love to know if something like that exists (even a third party software).

Nish: "I always wonder is there a way to set up two computers to render one picture?" If I understand you correctly VuePro does this, it's able to split single images into bits and send those bits to any machine on your network that has a cow on it, then reassembles the image back on the main machine. DaleB: What are the specs of your farm boxes? Regards

Well, Let see.... From top to bottom we have; (1)Athlon XP-1800 on a Shuttle AK-38 Mobo. 512megs DDR 226 ram. 20gig WD HDD and a SIS 8meg AGP card. Red cooling fans (and the NIC cable matches the fan LED colors; not enough contrast to show that in the picture.. ;) ) (2)Athlon XP1800 on a Chaintech K7S5a-Pro Mobo (this one is DDR-333 capable, but I pulled the XP2500+ out of it and put it in my main system when I upgraded the board). 512megs DDR. Also a 20 gig WD HDD and *meg SIS AGP card. Green fan. (3) Athlon AMD 700 on a Shuttle A-161 mobo (original AMD chipset). 385megs PC-133 sdram. 20gig Seagate HDD. Jaton 4meg PCI video card. Whitebox 10100 NIC card. Blue fan. (4) Athlon XP-1700 on a Shuttle AK-31 mobo. 512megs DDR 266 ram. A Jaton 8meg AGP card. Purple fan. Unless specified, all the motherboards have on board NIC and VIA chipsets. The power supplies run from 250 to 300 watts, and are CompUSA specials. About 23rd's of the components are out of my junk bin from previous upgrades.

Vue Pro does indeed allow you to split renders, unfortunately it doesn't work too well for me - Vue Pro crashes when it starts assembling the picture (me = bad-luck magnet). I'll try doing things your way (adding cows one at a time) and see if it helps. By the way, do your cows ever show up twice in the list? I usually see 'MachineA' and its ip-address '192.168.1.5' as two separate entries in the distributed render dialog.

ah, ok great, thanks David. So I guess we the Vue 4 owners has to suck up 12/13 hrs of renders. :-)

Hmm. The only time I've seen that one was when I used the zipfile of the Pro Cow that E-on posted on their website forum. The renderboxes were launching a dual iteration of ProCow for some reason, and both of them -looked- active, but were, for lack of a better term, busted all to hell. They never returned a 'testures received' flag, and kept accepting the texures until the physical ram flooded out and the box faw down go boom. Something is definitely not right there.

Yeah - I tried an isolated two-machine setup yesterday. Let me tell you how it went: Both machines had a fresh Win2KS installation. VP + cow on one, cow on the other - all e-on updates installed. The same thing with the dual entries happened. The standalone cow also complained about various MS Visual C++ dll's missing. (IMHO: Using Microsoft Foundation Classes is a disgrace and the programmers at e-on should be flogged for using them). Ahem. Eventually I did manage to find them, though. Once I had deselected their ip-counterparts, the cows then actually worked fine until towards the end of the render, where they insisted on rendering the same tile of the image (Danish Spring). When they returned their data from the render, all hell broke loose. The cows simply died and VP crashed to the desktop. BWAHAAAA! Sniff I tried again with the Amazon image - same deal. When I tried 'Danish Spring' again, both cows crashed halfways and VP froze. Oh well, I'm sure I'll figure it out someday. Funny part is, I'm a LightWave user and have had absolutely zero problems with their cow-sounterpart. Something is definitely not right....hmmm.

Yeah, I kind of agree about the MFC dll's...on the other hand, if you code something to play nice with Windows specific modules, you tend to have less issues with the OS. I've just gotten in the habit of installing Visual C++ 6 as part of a standard Windows install (the RenderCows are far from the only proggie I use that starts screaming for MFC42.dll, VBRXXX, and a handful of others. And I have the handy option of debugging whatever goes Tango Uniform, and if tech support asks for more info, I can send them the text file). E-on's code monkeys aren't the only ones who tend to forget that development boxes have a lot of things stuffed into System32 that the average user doesn't, more's the pity (and if you happen to have the zip file from E-on, then the required files are in there in the correct folder location; I just copied them into System 32 on my renderboxes. And archived the zip for future needs... ;P ). On the other hand, considering how 'compatible' various iterations of those files are, and the way they get overwritten so happily by other installations, I can kind of see the logic in letting the consumer deal with their own config. Or at least the financial neccessity... Was this a sidegrade to VuePro? The reason I ask is that I found things stabilized considerably when I had left the Vue4 Cow on the system. Both Cows boot properly, running on port 5000 and 5002, respectivly. There could be a file that the Vue4 Cow requires that is better behaved, or the sidegrade Cow simply assumes that it's older sister is there, and makes use of some of the framework in place...

I hear ya on the programming issues - hopefully .Net will make our dll-troubles a thing of the past (well, one can only hope). Maybe in five years time..? ;) Hmm...both machines have fresh installs, so yeah, that might be worth looking into. I upgraded from Vue3 and I don't have Mover. I think I'll also try distributing the port numbers differently, you never know...perhaps two of them use the same port. Surely that shouldn't be an issue??

If Microsoft is behind it, forget it. Look at the specs that have been leaked for Longhorn. I =still= have yet to find anyone who can explain just why in the blue peeping Hell you need a GeForce 4 equivalent 3D accelerator -JUST- to render the desktop for? Now, if we actually had holographic displays, it might make sense. But a flat screen is 2D no matter what trick you use, and frankly there are enough 2D gags that can do the 3D illusion without the cost and power overhead of an accelerator. And frankly, all I can see .NET being good for is as another attempt to shove people into 'pay per program access' that MS was babbling about years ago. Remember, where there would be no applications, everyone would have nothing but a dumb terminal, and all data and software would be kept on MS servers? And you got charged per access? .Net? I think .NOT!

Erm....okay, so you don't like Microsoft? Just kidding - actually, I've worked with Java for the past five years, so I really have no business commenting on .Net and all that. And I only know Longhorn by name, but you make it sound like a creation of Baal (oh, wait...) Naaah, I'll stick with my company-provided W2K, thank you very much. Won't upgrade until physically forced to! ;-) But, in order to keep the thread on-topic (don't wan't Guitta on our backs), I have to report that changing the port numbers actually helped a lot! I've rendered 'Danish Spring', 'Amazon' and 'Hospital' without a hitch! Animations are still buggy - 'Mount Phoul' crashed VuePro within a minute, but I'm a lot more confident I'll get it working now. Is this another case of RTFM? I could have sworn...