ok got a new PC to act as my secondary renderer..network all ok, test with simple eco system scene, still image not animated, fine...looks ok. new beta build too but pray tell me WTF this programme will only allow network rendering of still images WHEN IT WANTS TO, hm? some scene it will allow HyperVue, some it won't, generally have to go into Ultra setting to enable it. on many saved scenes I have, the "cows" recieve the file then disconnect for no apparent reason. checks CPU usage, nope no activity..leaves them for a while, comes back, nope, no activity...eh?!? jebuz and the manual doesn't tell you that DUH, you should install a cow on your normal PC too... Sorry, this is utter rubbish. LOL, so bad it's Kafka-esque. Can someone please expalin this ridiculous behaviour from a so-called "professional" package"? :(

..lets steam pours form ears a bit to calm, adds info ;) -Older/main PC is WIn Xp Pro -New PC is Xp Home -3 GHz Intel in each -2 hard drives multiple partition in older/main PC -single hard drive partitioned in new PC. -Older/main PC 2 GIG ram, new one 1 gig I have tried a variety of scenes, some made on the fly, some loaded from tutorials, some of my own. -Infinite doesn't always let you use HyperVue, it's often greyed out, unles you use Ultra. -Scenes have crashed on the final tile for no reason I can see. -Some renders work fine. -All stills, no animations. -Currently rendering the Sponza scene as I type at 640x480 for test, will see how it turns out I will try and get latest firmware for my (new) router as that's about only thing I can think that could cause non-Infinite based mayhem *sighs deeply :(

Sponza worked fine, yet again though, the choice of being allowed to use HyperVue was seemingly arbitary on render quality settings boggle

Yea, the rendercows are not Vue's strong suit. My favorite is how all the rendercows crash at the end of rendering an animation. That is just one of the problems. I've detailed a lot of these problems in the vue forums, back when I was using Vue 4 "Professional" and they didn't fix any of it for Vue 5 Infinite...so I wouldn't hold my breath for any fixes...just try to work around it as best you can...

I use rendercows with no problems. Install rendercow on every PC you want to be involved, bingo. I guess some people have problems with it, others do not.

render cows use to work so bad that if star fields were rendered they would jump all around. Took about a year or more for them to fix. Simple scenes work with cows. Stills rendered with complex lighting cause the lighting in the panels that make up the image not to match. It is a pain in the ass and not professional at all. People who use the software everyday with a variety of complexity know what I am talking about.

sighs Rather PO'd because I often do complex scenes with several Poser figures and these seem to be the worst culprits :(

I use render cows with few problems. To enable Hypervue, you don't need ultra, go with user settings and edit your rendering settings. You'll need to choose "render to screen" if you are rendering a still, and hybrid motion blur/DOF isn't compatible ( for stills only). Other than that, you should be able to use your cows ok, apart from the odd lighting problem that I've had a few times at random: th light is computed differently from one tile to the other, and E-on hasn't been able to answer clearly on this. Will try rendering again with the new patch.

I had great success with the new patch and the cows. all machines were responsive and no problems. one thing I did was keept it simple. today I lean towards more complexity.

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse...the latest update competely breaks the render cows when rendering large scenes. Of course, the render cows all automatically update when you run them with the latest version, so I had to go back and delete the render cow directory on all my rendering computers, re-install Vue 5i (uninstalling the updates causes more problems than it fixes) then re-install ALL the freaking rendercows just to render my scene...though at least now the scene renders with the previous version of vue. This is all over the Vue registered user forum...nice one e-on...keep up the "good" work...

When you say large, how large? I mean, for example I use rendercows to generate images that are only 720 x 576 but lots of them. Is it only image size renders that are broken?

Render size 1280 x 720 (HD). The scene has 3 poser characters and 3 ecosystems. Takes about an hr and 30 mins to render a frame on my AMD 3200+ with 1 gig ram. Scene file is ~70mb and poser files are maybe 2mb each (x3). I'm not sure if it is the size of the frame or the size of the scene, but whatever it is, everyone is complaining about "large" scenes. I'm not sure what the threshold is, but in my case, I needed 1280 x 720 and all the vue render cows would disconnect immediately after I started to render with them, but only with the latest Vue update...like I said...people are complaining about this all over the e-on registered forums as well.

I think it's more the size of your Poser figures texture maps. I don't know much about Poser, but I've read here that even in Infinite, one Poser figure is a lot to render, if it has Hi res textures maps. Maybe you should try Dburdick's procedural skin mat, in the free stuff area, and see how it it renders.

The point is that the scenes render fine using the version before the latest update...so it is not a problem with the scenes themselves. It is rendering now on the old version of Vue 5i as I type this...

So maybe it's a Poser thing. Did you try rendering a large scene with no Poser stuff? I'm able to render a 2400x1600 scene, with various ecos, 200 millions polys and GI with no problem on 2 not so up to date machines, in about a night. I sometimes get the odd lighting problem, but I haven't tried since last update.