Dale B posted at 9:17AM Fri, 31 January 2020 - #4377262

Heh. You should get seachnasaigh to show you pictures of his **whole **lash up. Galadriel is just one box of many if I remember correctly. Gave StallionTek a bit of business. Had all those conversations from the Vue board marked, until the links went sour with an update.

Dale B posted at 9:18AM Fri, 31 January 2020 - #4377315

At least one puddle. His rig was intended for Vue rendering, which can make the harshest Superfly rendering seem....tame. With a rendergarden you can distribute the buckets across the network, and crank the settings up to insane levels. I suspect there was some of the Potato Chip Effect at work as well. No one can eat just one, after all....

Ohki isn't likely to accumulate a lot of computers, but for those considering such, my advice is to buy used enterprise-grade machines with dual CPUs, with as many processor cores as possible, and plenty of memory. If they are going to only be render slaves (not used as a workstation), then server blades will be the least expensive. eBay is a good place to look; search for 2x Xeon, or 2x X5670 for example. Figure on supplying a new hard drive and buy an OEM Windows license - it must come with the holographic validation sticker!

Blades are those thin (vertically) chassis intended to be mounted in a rack. You can just stack them on a milk crate if you only have three or four, like so:

If you gather more, it will be more convenient to rack-mount the blades:

Scrounge one modest monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse. Connect all of the render slaves to the single monitor/keyboard/mouse with a KVM switch.

The "squid" type KVM is good for four or fewer render slave computers:

For more machines, a KVM switchbox will work:

If your workstation's motherboard has this oddball SIML-C slot (always at the bottom), you can install a KVM card and boot/monitor/control all of the render slaves from the workstation.

Poser 12, in feet.  

OSes:  Win7Prox64, Win7Ultx64

Silo Pro 2.5.6 64bit, Vue Infinite 2014.7, Genetica 4.0 Studio, UV Mapper Pro, UV Layout Pro, PhotoImpact X3, GIF Animator 5