I get the general idea... install the distributed software on several computers, then send the render out to be divided... multiple processors working on different parts... yada yada.

How much good does it really do? I've got a pretty gutsy machine to begin with (AMD 6400+ Black, quad core, 8 GB Ram) and my other machine is just a little internet box with a 2.3 GHz single core and 4 MG Ram. 

I've tried this several times, but it keeps wanting me to open ports in my router, which I have no idea how to do.

Has anyone actually set this up and used it for rendering day-in and day-out? Is it worth all the trouble? Is it worth buying another high-end machine to share the render load? Are there any other solutions out there? 

I use it whenever I have to render out an animation. I just basically installed it in accordance with the instructions, forget if I had to open a port, might have done, if so I do not recall any issues. Just ensure that Queue Manager is open on the remote machines prior to starting a render.

You should install 'Queue Manager 2010' on whichever machines on your network you wish to utilise. If you can see the PC on the network, Queue Manager should too.

I'm lucky enough to have a couple of decent-spec PCs avaliable that mostly sit doing nothing except storing huge amounts of data: the processors and RAM are therefore 'free'. I have things configured so that these do the rendering while I'm setting up new scenes or whatever.

PhilC - I don't do animations... just scene renders, but with LOTS of detail and props. Will I gain much by this?

cspear - Thanks... I'll make sure I've got everything visible.
 

Each frame gets farmed out to the available computers, they then render that frame then signal for the next one upon completion.  If you are only doing a single frame then, no you'll not see any benefit.

That's what I was afraid of. Thanks! 

You'd only  notice a benefit rendering single frames, if you're rendering a very heavy scene, and you close Poser and everything possibly close-able and just have the queue manager open to render, as it does not need Poser to be open in order to render.
The benefit would lie in having the queue manager as much free memory to render as possible.
Of course, this is a specific case where there would be a difference, but for pretty much all the time, there won't be a difference.

I wanted to test this myself before asking, but I can't seem to get Queue Manager to accept my serial number. (Side question: Is the QM serial the same as the main app serial, or am I supposed to have a different one?)

Are you guys sure that running a single-frame render on 2 or more computers is not faster than on a single computer? I thought the work was divided up by buckets, so that multiple computers can work together sharing the effort even on a single frame. Did you actually test it or just speculating?

I'm not disputing - I just thought it was truly distributed even for a single frame. As I said, I'm trying to test it but having difficulties.

 BB there's a separate serial for the queue manager. It starts with QM[the first 4 digits of your Poser serial] and then some seemingly random letters and digits :)

The only other  computer I have isn't currently hooked up to our network... I must try this though because I've just spent the last 5 hours + rendering a simple 30 frame animation that isn't even done yet... >_<

Thanks, TG. I got my Poser Pro 2010 SN when I started development, 3 months before it was released, but that's all I have. I'll have to ask SM for a QM serial number before I can contribute any useful data.

I'm rendering right now (but not in Poser) so I cannot see if the bucket rendering is distributed along the network. But my guess is, it is not, as unless you have a very fast network, there could be a bandwidth bottleneck... maybe, I'm no coding guru, but that is what my logic tells me

I just did a render of an underwater scene that takes over 4 minutes because of raytracing and other complicated math rendering stuff. All the data for the scene (geometries, textures) fits in 21 MB of disk and can be transmitted from one computer to another in two seconds. Which means that would not be a bottleneck. I'm very interested to see if two computers can render that scene in 2 minutes. (Or 2 minutes + 2 seconds grin)

Quote - I'm rendering right now (but not in Poser) so I cannot see if the bucket rendering is distributed along the network. But my guess is, it is not, as unless you have a very fast network, there could be a bandwidth bottleneck... maybe, I'm no coding guru, but that is what my logic tells me

Gigabit ethernet is almost standard on modern motherboards so it's not a huge bottleneck, say a couple of seconds for the scene to transfer and rendering to start on the slaves. On regular 100mbps there's a longer delay, say 20-30 sec for a typical scene. Of course once the slaves start rendering, the buckets themselves transfer pretty fast.

That's based on how it works in other renderers though as I haven't tested poser on my farm.

Single renders get rendered per client, i.e. a single render is not shared across multiple clients. I thought it may do this when I first tried it but no, if you have five clients each set to receive network jobs and you set the queue manager on the sixth machine to send network jobs and then add a job, it'll just get sent to one client for processing, the others will sit there waiting for a job - they don't help.

Fine for animation rendering but doesn't do much other than free up the machine you're working on if just rendering single scenes.

Oh, heck.

Quote - PhilC - I don't do animations... just scene renders, but with LOTS of detail and props. Will I gain much by this?

cspear - Thanks... I'll make sure I've got everything visible.
 

can you show a render as an example?

in my time on this forum i saw a lot of people saying how they spend 10-20 hours for one render. when they showed the results it looked like something you could render in 2 hours. they used the wrong settings and their models were not good enough.

i dont want to insult i just want to see if you really need more then one computer for a poser render.

It seldom takes more than an hour for my computer to complete a render, even with IDL turned on and juiced up. I was just trying to see if I could make it even faster. 

To clarify.. Queue Manager allows you to Render Multiple Frames with Multiple Machines over a Network. You can not Render a Single Frame over multiple machines in a Network.

I recently finished up several Shorts for a client and made use of the Network Rendering to Render the 15 Second and 30 Second spots along with the 1 Minute and 2 Minute Indepth Spots using Queue Manager. The 2 Minute Indepth Spot would have taken about 18 hours to Render on my best machine, but took less than 4 hours to Render over the Network. That is the purpose of the Network Rendering. Images were compiled in Adobe and soundtracks added.

You can use Queue Manager to Render Stills Locally, but it will not Render the Stills over Multiple Machines, so the time will not improve for a Per Frame rate.

Thanks, Rat...

This was what I suspected. I just wanted to know BEFORE I spent a pot of money on another high-performance machine to network with this one.

I'm not unhappy with my render times or quality. I'm just always looking for a way to do more faster! :) 

I wonder what this guy is doing then. Either he is blowing smoke saying he is rendering a single scene with 9 cores accross the network, I am totally misinterpreting what he is saying as a single frame to be an animation, or he found a way to make it work across multiple computers for one frame. Take your pick, either way, ***the link below contains nudity, so don't click if you are at work.

http://market.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1788530&member

I should add I am totally disappointed if queue manager can't distribute a single frame render across multiple computers which from my understanding of the manual, it can't. Vue is really nice in this regards because it can, and it also gives you the ability to pause a render and resume it at a later time.

I'm wondering if he just THOUGHT it got distributed to the various machines...

Four hours sounds like an awfully long time for a render that size with no more than he has in it, at least on my machine. I've NEVER had a render last four hours since I've had PP2010, and I usually use the Firefly render script by D3D and have the quality turned up to at least half scale!

I assume Smith Micro is working on that feature for a future release. At least, one can hope.
Heck, I'd be happy if one of the commercial render farms would bite the bullet and start handling Poser materials... there's times when I'd gladly pay for a quick render!

But enough.

Quote - I wonder what this guy is doing then. Either he is blowing smoke saying he is rendering a single scene with 9 cores accross the network, I am totally misinterpreting what he is saying as a single frame to be an animation, or he found a way to make it work across multiple computers for one frame. Take your pick, either way, ***the link below contains nudity, so don't click if you are at work.

---

http://market.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1788530&member

I should add I am totally disappointed if queue manager can't distribute a single frame render across multiple computers which from my understanding of the manual, it can't. Vue is really nice in this regards because it can, and it also gives you the ability to pause a render and resume it at a later time.

If you go to his Home Page you will see the Animation. I am not sure if he thought the Animation was showing up in the Gallery or if there is a link missing...

NUDITY in Below link

http://market.renderosity.comhttp://market.renderosity.com/homepage.php?userid=57925 

NUDITY in Above Link

Count me in the disappointed ranks as well, to me if you have a network queue it shouldn't matter if you're doing a single or multi frame render.  Many other packages do this quite well, and some for less than Poser.

Oh well

I don't know about newer versions but Cinema 4D used something called a 'tile camera,' which essentially split a still into segments and sent them to the network renderer as frames of an animation. You had to put the resulting images together in an image editor. Sounds dinky but perhaps something similar could be implemented for Poser.

"I'd be happy if one of the commercial render farms would bite the bullet and start handling Poser materials..."

I'm guessing the hangup there is the content. Since you probably can't legally transfer it, even temporarily, the render farm would have to own all the figures, textures, clothes etc. for whatever scene you wanted to render - at least I'm assuming that's the way it works.
 

Yeah that old school 'divide and conquer' approach is the way to go if your renderer doesn't do network rendering on single frames. It would require scripting to divide the main camera into sub cameras that you then save into separate files. Send these files to the slaves, reassemble the render(s) you get and it would be a fair approximation of how it works in other apps. Maybe one of you poser gurus would like to take a crack at it ?

It shouldn't really be that hard for them to implement shared rendering of a single scene, it effectively already does it over multiple cores. The queue manager already has the network code to send and receive the required files, it 'just' needs to be able to apportion parts of the image as well.

Alternatively, some python script guru writes us some code that'll automatically do precise area renders of a scene, spit them out to the queue and then a stand alone little app that'll take the renders and stitch them back together again...

I just tried doing a network render of a still in Kerkythea. You have to copy the scene file(s) to the slave(s) manually and start the job on each machine manually as well but from there it works fine - the slave(s) transmit their work back to the master. The infamous refrain no developer wants to hear, "if this little freeware program can do it ... :-) 

"old school 'divide and conquer' approach"

Yeah, the manual stitching is a bit chintzy. I could write the code to automate that.. If you get the  tiles, it should be possible to make the entire process pretty transparent. 

Is it still about animations only in 2012?  I would love to hear it works on stills now too.

I don't mind if it does stills. I just need to know if it can send a single frame still to the network box (slave) and therefore reduce the load on the Master. Q1 plan to upgrade my desktop box and the one I am using would be available to do single frame still rendering if this is possible.

     It would be a nice advance for the next Pro version to enable QM to parcel out buckets instead of entire frames.  Especially useful for those occasions when you're doing a finished-quality wallpaper.

     Regarding the separate serial for QM, my guess is that QM has its own serial because QM may be installed on multiple computers and several copies run simultaneously;  as opposed to the licensing of the Poser Pro main app.