Hi I was reading the blurb on Mover5 on E-On Softwares site and noticed that it mentions HyperVue. From what I could pick up from the description it allows you to network render - is that right? So If I have a single copy of Vue5 and buy Mover5, can I distribute the processing of a scene amongst my 3 computers in the house effectively giving me a render in a third of the time? This would seem a cheaper option than investing in a dual processor machine since Mover 5 is around 60. If the above is true, how many machines can I link together with a single copy of Mover and Vue 5 (or do I have to buy additional licenses for each machine)? Any clarification on this would be greatly appreciated. Oh, one other question while I'm here. The purchase of Vue 5 entitles me to $50 in the New Vue store. Anyone have any idea when that is going to appear and also, can I use my $50 against Mover 5? Cheers

No idea about the voucher; And yes, you can do distributed renders. Mover 5 comes with a 5 node liscence (you can run 5 Rendercows). At the =moment=, however, the Vue 5 specific cows are not functional; E-on is working on it as I type. As soon as they find the bug, they'll be posting either an update or a stand alone Cow install for the Vue 5 cow at their website. But Mover 5 works just fine. You may not get exactly that 3rd of expected time (it will depend on how comparable the other boxes are to the one running Hypervue), but the speed up is...very nice. At one time there was an expansion that permitted a 50 Cow liscence, but I haven't seen that one in awhile...

Thanks for the info Dale. I may delay purchase of Mover until it works with Vue5 since I use Vue 5 Exclusively now. I also noticed on the sheet that came with Vue 5 (should have checked that first!) it says Mover5 only supports animation with RenderCow NOT a single scene! Thats a bit annying since I really only do static scenes but maybe I'll moe into animation eventually.

Anyone know how Rendercow works? Is it the whole of the rendering algorithms packaged up into one executable (I assume you don't have to install Vue 5 on every machine?). also how does each Render cow know which bit of the animation to render - do you have to specify which frames on each machine or does it intelligently know which frames need rendering?

Cheers

What the Rendercow is, in essence, is the Vue rendering engine, minus the GUI and library management systems, and with a simplified file system and a TCP/IP interface. When you install Mover 5 (or have the Pro version of Vue), HyperVue is installed; this is the distributed network manager. How it works is that it uses the actual Vue application as the controller; each Cow is sent the scene data (geometry, etc), then the textures, so that they have no need of accessing the main system for resources (it's a good idea to have the swap file set to 2 or 3 gigabytes, just so you have enough room for textures -and- processing space). The next bit of data sent is the frame parameters (which frame it is, pixel ratio, size, screen format, some other things). The HyperVue manager works on a polling basis (Vue itself does not render when it acts as the controller; you need to have a Cow installed on the system Vue is on). Whichever Cow is listed first on the list of detected Cows will render frame 0, and on down the list in descending order. When a Cow is done with a frame, it sends it back to the controller with a flag that it is ready for a new job, and the controller sends it the next available frame that isn't being actively rendered. The rendered frames are saved in a temp format until the whole batch is done, then are converted -after- the animation sequence is finished (HyperVue is sensitive to packet collision, and apparently memory fragmentation can play havoc as well, so the conversion and saving has to wait until there's no active rendering going on) As for animation.... has anyone pointed you at Phoul's site yet...? O:)

Thanks again Dale - you've cleared up a lot there Cheers