I know probably someone already proposed this, anyway... A rendering farm would be, I think, something really good to have.

What is a rendering farm?

A bunch of computers, used together, that speeds up the overall time of rendering by parsing out individual frames, usually used for animations. My questions are: How? Would people have individual accounts on the servers to parse frames to? What software would everyone use? If I'm doing an animation in 3D Max, but the system is setup for Maya, I'm out of luck. Why? What is the incentive for R'osity to purchase, setup, and maintain multiple machines. Never mind the possibility for people to upload viruses. As soon as you are allowing people to do render-farming, you are allowing them to control remote computers at the application level. Far to open for any IT person to sleep well at night. Other then these questions, I would love for someone to setup a free render farm! It would save me thousands of dollars, and be very cool to put on the business card: "Unlimited rendering! Animations done before you ask for them!Peace in our time! All this for less then a phone call! So, call now!" ;>

Thank you. I guess that should have been self-evident, but sometimes I ask to make sure my "guess" is close to the truth.

What is the incentive for R'osity to purchase, setup, and maintain multiple machines. The same that makes them run this site, i think. I mean, if you go to sourceforge.net they have a testing and compiling farm for users, why shouldn't we have one too? Obviously not all the programs would be supported (neither are on sourceforge), but it is already something don't you think? > Never mind the possibility for people to upload viruses. As soon as you are allowing people to do render-farming, you are allowing them to control remote computers at the application level. Far to open for any IT person to sleep well at night. I don't know what OS and server this site is running on, but allocating part of the computation power to a rendering server is not that difficult (even in Windozzz)... > Never mind the possibility for people to upload viruses. I know is quite different, but when you upload a jpg image what do you think the server does? It reads the file, it checks if it is a virus, then if it is a jpeg bitmap, then if it is a valid jpeg bitmap (dimensions...), and then it stores it. What would happen to a(let's say) .brc (bryce)or .whateveryouwant file. Is read, then scanned for viruses, then checked to be a valid bryce file, and then enqueued to be rendered. I can't see all those problems... Am I wrong?

Sooo, when is your renderfarm going on-line? My files are standing by! ;>

The worse deaf is the one that doesn't want to listen... Well, as a member of renderosity I'm waiting for OUR rendering farm... this is why i started the thread... I myself don't have a digital art site running on big servers with a lot of available bandwidth. This is why i was asking if it was possible to have a rf. Anyway, it seems I'm wasting time

Perhaps we could setup a SETI@Home-type interface and use all of the unused cycles on the members' systems?

Why not? It's an alternative...

It would be nice, actually. It takes me a long time to render in Poser 5 and I can't do very large graphics because of the limits of memory on my computer. I'm not sure I understand how it would quite work but it would be helpful in theory.