nXtRender Farm Questions

[Andrew Uno]

Hey everyone,

  New to this forum, but I had a couple of questions regarding the nXtRender Farm that I haven't really seen answered on the forums.

• To start I have a file that has been active in the farm for around 16 hours now and it's size is minimal the base dwg is only 25.4 MB and the complexity is rather limited, I'm unfamiliar with the potential cons of online render farms this is the first time in my career I've not had access to an in-house render farm.
  • Is this a queue time thing? A failure or error in my drawing? or is it a fairly standard speed I will have to grow accustom to?
• Since sending the drawing to farm a NXTMODEL File of a total size of 1.45 GB has populated with the title of 0.nXtModell what is this file? It seems rather large compared to the base file used even if I incorporated a massive amount of complexity with shadows and reflective surfaces this seems to be a bit much. 

Any help or advice would be much appreciated. I've been running the renderings I do at 2000 passes and 1 task.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

The nXt Render farm is a simple, in house, render farm-- NOT an online one.  If you haven't set up any machines to access the files it will remain there forever.

The nXtModel is a binary dump of what the file looks like in memory.  Lots of things can make it grow relative to file sizes.  Trees, bitmaps, hdr files, tesselation of curved objects-- etc.

[Andrew Uno]

Thank you for your fast response Roy. My co-workers and I all have nXt Render farm on our systems; correct me if I am wrong but if render farm as a program works as an in-house render farm it is acting as conduit if you will for our systems to work as a distributive or collaborative farm? 

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Yep, that's about it.  The individual "farmers" need to be running on each participating machine.  They all watch a common "Farm Folder" which needs to be read/write accessible to everyone.  They'll latch on to any available task and run with it.  Beware of slow networks and slow machines-- this all tends to work best with uniform systems.

[Andrew Uno]

That was very helpful and I was better able to communicate with my fellow co-workers and management how things are operating. We are currently in a transition to fiber optic and with this information I have additional information for my proposal of investing in further tech capital like the beginning of a dedicated render farm.