haegerst opened this issue on Jun 17, 2008 ยท 19 posts
chippwalters posted Fri, 20 June 2008 at 12:31 AM
haegerst,
I agree with Jonj611, I believe using rendercows as you've suggested is just 'extending' the network outside one's own LAN and should be legal. But, you of course know you can't alter in anyway the existing RenderCow software including modifying it's 'affinity value' for processor usage.
But here's where I think you're going to find trouble (and you've already identified it previously): The amount of files and data sent over the internet is typically huge for scenes which need to take advantage of multiple computer power. In many cases, this will take longer than the actual render time, and noting one is limited to a max of five render nodes, I doubt there will be much gained overall.
You mention you want to 'limit' the size of files, but how can you do that w/out interfering with existing proprietary RenderCow code? That's a problem.
This is the reason Ranch and others have you send the whole scene. It only needs to be uploaded one time, and then is dispersed through their own LAN to render.
Another issue is the overall robustness of RenderCows currently. At best, network rendering in Vue is-- shall we say-- an 'aquired taste.' More than once it hangs up, doesn't complete, doesn't connect, doesn't transfer, etc-- and that's for those of us who use it all the time. I can't imagine how frustrating it could be to have it not work after a 15 minute upload of a scene to an internet enabled RenderCow. And interrupting network renders sometimes results in having to restart the RenderCows on all associated computers.
I use a 4 node hypervue system here and find many times the LAN upload traffic takes as long as the renderings-- and that's at 1 Mb/sec. Imagine how slow it would be at only a few K per second? Not to mention confi
A nice idea, but I have my suspicions there's a lot to overcome. Good luck though!