I'd like to re-float my "render condo" idea again, as part of the mix of judging these powerful multi-thread systems.

This idea is strictly for animation, not stills.

Instead of investing in an expensive quad, what about investing in four nodes. You'd go for low-cost 'boxes' that do the best possible render job on 1 singleton CPU. I bet you could create a box for $500-$700. (Irony, the cost of purchasing the OS becomes more and more significant a percentage of the whole when thinking this way. Damn you, Bill! You too, Steve!)

You have to license Poser 4 times; you can probably get a quantity discount or site license for this. I paid $129 for my second and third licenses. Each node sould be fed an identical runtime folder.

Then, instead of figuring out how to "set up a poser render farm" you just send the pz2 to all four nodes and do "make movie", assigning a different frame range to each. You can have them deposit their frames in a common folder, or each in their own folder for combining later.

This approach works. I have three licenses for Poser 5 (only one kicked up to 7 so far) with one being a Mac license. I've done this and it works.

One of the advantages, of course, is if there is a flaw or failure in one, the other three continue on their merry way and the run is not stopped, as it would in a single machine with four threads, were that to fail. It also provides great flexibility....you 'get to see' the results of the animation in four separate parts of the sequence; you could keep three nodes going and resend a modified pz2 to the fourth if necessary; not all nodes would have to attack the same pz2, they could all be working on different scenes, rendering a folder of images with After Effects, etc.

::::: Opera :::::

Question: With multicore/threaded machines and Poser's "render to outside process" can you 'instance'? In other words, is it possible to have more than one actual render running on one computer?