Sorry if this has been covered before but, I've been searching google for 2 hours now with only ideas covered for maya and other highend apps.
Is there ANY decent info on how to use PoserPro's renderfarm capabilities? Stuff like:

• recommended CPU/ram sizes on slave/node machines
• best way to network all machines together (can't be technical enough on this one)
• do all OS's need to match?
• does the render queue manager need to be on all machines?
• are extra licenses required for each machine?

If somebody can point me in the right direction, that would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks ahead!

and Happy New Year!!!!!!!!!!

There is a little information at http://my.smithmicro.com/mac/poserpro/index.html
There is a pulldown for features .

It seems the remder queue manager is on your main machine , and each render node system gets a render node software . 

No extra licenses needed up to whatever node limit exists.

Using mental ray for Maya, there are a few considerations. Stands to reason the same would apply for Poser:

• More than eight machines, performance degrades. The benefit of using multiple machines verses network overhead becomes an issue.

• The most CPU resources you can afford, RAM not so important. I'm personally looking at five P4 3ghz boxes with 512MB RAM each.

• Don't know about Poser but as long as the OS supports the render node software you should have no worries. Vue works well here across five computers - three Macs, two Windows.

@Markschum - you're right about the little information part! :P Thanks for the link, as it does answer some of my questions.

@Replicand - I also had the general impression that each machine needed to be rather strong on the CPU. Didn't know about the ram. I noticed that you use Vue in a network. Can you give me a breakdown of how you have this set up? What type of network switch do you use? Do the cat5 cables need to be dual-direction data flow?

I'm just getting started with networking at my job and know a little bit about dedicated servers and VPN's and such.

My thoughts are of using my main machine as the server where Pro will reside (2.6ghz quad-core, 4g of ram, 512mb nVidia 8800 GT, 2 sata 500g hard drives, 2g ethernet). The nodes will be 5 or 6 IBM thinkstations with P4 3ghz, 1g ram, 80g hd and onboard graphics. Does this sound like a reasonable set up worth building?

Quote - My thoughts are of using my main machine as the server where Pro will reside (2.6ghz quad-core, 4g of ram, 512mb nVidia 8800 GT, 2 sata 500g hard drives, 2g ethernet). The nodes will be 5 or 6 IBM thinkstations with P4 3ghz, 1g ram, 80g hd and onboard graphics. Does this sound like a reasonable set up worth building?

A single modern quad-core is easily 5-6x faster then a P4, ie your server will outperform your entire farm all by itself. It'd probably be a lot better to just buy another quad core system and setup a 2 node farm instead.

I concur with ghonma, if your Poser machine will run a render queue and use multiple cores you will get the same throughput as several single core machines.

Each render node needs enough memory to store all the texture maps etc that Poser uses.

Now see, on the one hand, I'm reading that ram size isn't that important. Then again, it is (which makes a lot of sense really). And I will say that my quad-core machine is YEARS ahead of my P4 machine on rendering. In fact, P7 on my single-core machine basically chokes on any render with reflection, while the quad can snap out even more complex renders in just minutes (using P7). PoserPro's render engine IS a tad bit slower than P7's but, still works quite well.

So maybe building 1 or 2 more quad-cores as nodes is the real answer here. Rather expensive but, then again it might be worth it.

Any more thoughts on this would be great, as there really just isn't enough info on this subject floating around. For those with networks on Maya, Vue or Lightwave... feel free to tell us how your setup works. Networking is new territory for me and i can use all the help I can get :)

From what I remember reading about render farms a whle back is that they were a good way to make use of old computers. It's not necessary to buy all fast machines. I guess it comes down to a question of whether money or speed is the primary concern.