Quote - I have finished building the new computer and trying to set up network rendering.  Have a few questions...

1.  The rendercow program is installed on each cow.  According to the manual I also need to install it on my computer that runs Vue 5 Infinite.  If yes, does this count as 1 of the 5 cows?

2.  Autoscan - what is this doing?  I pressed it and it started giving me a list of hundreds of ports, all of them disconnected.  I though this would only find available cows?

3.  Does having one slow cow reduce the overall render time?  Out of the 4 computers I have available, one is a rather old P3. 

4.  Can I use the computers that are rendering for other programs, or does the rendering take 100% of the processor time?

Thanks!

Peggy

 

Peggy; 1) Yes. While Vue is acting as the render manager, it can't render itself, so you need a Cow installed on the main system. 2) The autoscan feature is supposed to look at the network and find available rendercows. I've found it better, at least with windows systems, to actually name the garden computers and add them by name. Autoscan can misinterpret some things. 3) Not really. HyperVue uses a polling system; when a Cow is finised with a frame, it gets the next available frame in the render queue. The P3 won't finish as many frames as newer computers do, and will take longer per frame, but you are still that many frames ahead. 4) Yes, you can use the other computers in the garden for other things. A RenderCow is designed to work as a background app, so another application designed to run in the foreground will work. The caveats I would apply are being careful running Internet apps,to avoid saturating the network and making Vue go Boom, and making sure that you have enough memory and hard drive swap file. And the more greedy that application is, the fewer cycles that the Rendercow will have to work with. Technically, you can also do work on the main computer, but all it takes is one tussle over a memrory block, or resources dropping below a threshold, and the render crashes and you probably lose what you have done.