I have a big animation that is taking way too long, so I installed RenderCows on several PCs. They work fine on a toy animation, but when I load the big animation it fails whether I use the rendercows or simply the external renderer on the host machine. Does the external renderer have limitations with respect to scene size? Anyone have any thoughts on what might get the external renderer and/or RenderCows to work with the big animation?

When you say that external rendering doesn't work either, you're not talking about simple batch rendering are you?  You mean network, still.

I meant the external stand alone renderer option that runs on the same system (non-hypervue, non-network). I experimented with it this morning and it doesn't work even for simple stuff.

I've sent my scenes to e-on in the past for them to test on their standalone batch renderer.  You may have to open a ticket with them and do the same.

As far as I know, there's no difference in resources used when rendering batch or rendering to the screen (other than batch rendering is slightly faster).  I don't have 10.5 to test for you.  I stopped at version 10.

I do have one question for you though.  When you connected to your RenderCows, did your main computer push down the Vue updates to them?  That has to be done.  I had to unblock via my firewall software for my RenderCows to get updated.

Everything is a new install so the rendercows match Vue. They work great for small scenes. They just barf on my gigabye (file size) scene.

Do the other machines match the specs of your main computer? They each should be at least 75% of the power/RAM of your main computer.  Are you rendering in passes yet?  That's what I do now.

One is similar, the other is much older, but it doesn't work on any subset including just on the host machine.