Warangel opened this issue on Mar 10, 2007 · 61 posts
louguet posted Sat, 10 March 2007 at 9:40 AM
Hi Warangel,
thanks for this review. I would just like to comment on a few things :
Poser animated figures are not supported because Vue relies on the Poser.exe application to deal with Poser animations, and does not integrate all needed information in a single .vue scene. This is how Vue does it, and there is not much we can do at this point.
However, static Poser figures are perfectly supported by the farm, provided they do not require an external link with Poser.exe or an external pz3 file (Vue is then able to embed all Poser information in the Vue file). We did tests with Poser / Skinvue figures and it works very well.
Encrypted C3D content is obviously not supported because it is tied to the user's system and cannot be rendered on any external system. It is a high price to pay for paying less when you buy the content :) When encrypted content is detected, all the farm can do is ignore it (or crash, but we prefer the first way :). So if you build a scene and intend to render it on the renderfarm, you have to buy non-encrypted content, and there will be no problem to render it.
The additional piece of software required to decompress the file is simply 7-Zip which is currently the best (and freeware) compressor on the market. We need to compress files, because professional animations rendered in bmp / tga / etc. with alpha and depth maps take a huge amount of space. Several gigabytes of data can be reduced to a few hundred megabytes after compression, and 7-zip (.7z) can make files 10 to 20% smaller than zip or other formats.
About the price, it is true that the price is expensive for a hobbyist. However, we are the cheapest renderfarm available right now :) Clearly, renderfarms are mostly used for professional projects. Running a farm is costly and it takes a lot of work to make it run smoothly (especially this one which is the first entirely automated for Vue).
That being said, we are thinking hard about what we could do to make it even more accessible... I would like nothing more than to see hobbyists using the farm. In fact, this thread is the perfect opportunity to hear everyone's opinion : at what price per hour would you consider using the farm regularly, as a hobbyist ? Answer honestly please (don't say for free :).
Fred
Oh, and indeed, it is very important to read the Renderfarm user Guide. All the technical aspects are explained in great detail in this guide.