Ok it look like with the latest V6I update that network rendering is fixed as far as i can tell. Hypervue saw my rendercows and updated them fine. Now heres my question and sorry if its been asked before. I need to render images at least 75000 pixels x 50000 pixels or roughly at least 20"x16" at 300dpi. I am using a Mac Pro 8-core with 4GB RAM as my main machine. I also have an older Mac G4 dual 1.42GHz with 2GB RAM. What is the best and fastest way to render? Just render to disk with only the Mac Pro or use network rendering with the other computer? I did a small test with one of the sample scenes and according to the finish time there wasnt much difference. But that was on a smaller size test. Any recommendations or ideas?

I personally would use the Mac Pro only. My experiences with network rendering of only 2-3 machines, one a Mac Pro shows as well, that the Mac Pro is taking over most of the rendering anyway (I hane an old G4 and a Windows box as default in the network). So why taking more stress that something in the network rendering can go wrong without too much benefit from it?

So render to disk on the Mac Pro is the way I would go. Or use a proefessional renderfarm when the renderings tend to become very long and would block the machines that are needed for other work in the meantime.

Thanks for the info wabe. Kind of what I was thinking since I didn't see any difference in render times between the two. Wish I could afford the renderfarm option but I think it would be way too expensive from what I calculated.

Another possibility might be, if you have photoshop, a program called Genuine Fractals. It is a scaling plug-in that allows you to increase the resolution of an image and scale it up with minimal lost of detail. That way you could render at a lower res (say 1/2 of current) and then bring it up to full size using GF. Just another idea.

MT

Would the minimal loss of detail be noticeable though? For poster work I would imagine you'd need as high detail as possible.

If the basic image is, say, 8"x10" at 300 dpi your could increase it to 16"x20" at 300 dpi with almost no image degradation. With larger images (increasing to 32x40) you drop the resolution to, perhaps, 240 dpi and the quality is the same.