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

Hi Peggy

Yes, you need to install it on your main PC because this will be the cow manager, I'm not sure it will count for one cow, maybe not if you don't use the cow.

Autoscan: I don't use it, seems to act strangely.

What I do is this: check every ip address  of the network computers, and enter manually the ip address in the Hypervue manager, it then finds the cows instantly.

Having a slow cow will only affect the frame/tile that is rendered by this cow. All cow management is done by the main computer, which needs to be the most efficient.

Rendefring will use 100% of your cpu power, but in my case, I can surf the net, or even use Photoshop while rendering, and I don't have the most powerful machines.

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.

I am having no luck getting this to work.  It seems once you select Auto Scan, every time you start, it goes through and starts scanning.  I have to enter the the IP address many time to finally get them in, and then get an error message that I can only use 5 cows while the stupid thing keeps going and going scanning all the ports. 

I spent a ton of money on the new computer and this had BETTER WORK!!!  Guess I'm off to e-on support. 

Peggy; Try starting Infinite,waiting until it's finished it's thing, then select each entry in the Hypervue window and remove it from the queue. Once Vue builds a table of possible Cow addresses, that table stays there unless they are removed, or Vue crashes in the middle of a render, blanking the table. A last resort is to open the options panel and hit the restore defaults button.

Got it working!!!  Had to disable Norton and change the name of my main computer.  For some reason, it did not like the space in the name?  Not sure why, but once I changed it from Peggy Main to PEGGYMAIN, it works.  Once that was taken care of, the next time I started Vue, the only 2 ports it found were the two computers.  Did a test render and now that it has it saved, it comes up fine each time.  The new AMD computer is really fast!  It was done with it's first tile when my main computer was only 13% done... 

Well, guess I spoke too soon. 

I had to un-install the RenderCow software on the new computer.  It runs OK during the render, but for some reason, when it is running just in the background the computer starts to act really weird.  The mouse is erratic (very sluggish) and the CD drawer keeps opening and closing.  As soon as I un-installed RenderCow, this problem went away.  Re-installed, problem returned again after the computer ran for a while.  Un-installed agin and so far computer is fine.  This is a brand new computer with only Windows XP on it - no other software...

I can try re-installing it, but not have it run in the background.  Maybe tomorrow. 

Never had a problem like this. Weird stuff, Peggy. Did you authorize the cows to connect to the computer in windows firewall?

Contacting Tech support is the best I can see, but they are so slow to answer these days.

I think the CD drive is bad.  Going to swap it out...  Also had to do a ton of Windows updates, so maybe that was the cause of the mouse problems?   Don't know - that has not happened again.  Re-installed the RenderCow but now only have it run on command.  So far one test render went through fine.  Have a few other weird thing to solve - I turned on file sharing for the folders where Vue saves the scenes in My Pictures and in the My Documents.  Now when I try to open a scene on my computer, it can't seem to find them in the recent files list.  I have to browse to the file... 

Will keep testing!  New computers are sooo much fun!

Peggy

sorry for taking your topic for my silly questions ...

You say that the rendering takes 100% of the cow's system, but you also can keep working on them ... so that means it is not using all the system resources. And since you say it is a running in background I keep wondering ... are these cows really working at its 100% for my render purposes?

Is not there a way you can make them work like S. XV slaves with no time to think in anything else than my renders?

The rendercows work in the background in a low-priority state. It means that if you don't run another program that needs itself a lot of CPU usage (like a 3D game), the cow will use every CPU cycle available. But when you temporarily need the cycles for a foreground application, the cow will keep a low-profile and use minimal cpu power.

It is the best way to deal with background rendering. In some other applications the render nodes eat always 95/100 % CPU power and slow down the entire machine no matter what. The drawback is, with Vue rendercows, sometimes you don't even remember they are working :)