Render Farm

[Peter Milner]

We are seriously looking into purchasing a rack of render nodes (minimum of 48 cores).

Would I need the render farm software to run a render on the nodes and if so, how would I set it up?

[Peter Milner]

I think I may have got it working by pointing all the farmers to the same shared folder. However I now seem to have another issue: The number of tasks is greyed out and although it says 10, it is only sending one task.

[Peter Milner]

I've sorted this one as well. The rendering was set to use the standard engine.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Let me know how the multiple office thing goes-- that hasn't been attempted AFAIK (and wasn't really designed or tested for it).  I have heard rumors that folks have been doing cloud rendering using the farm...

[Peter Milner]

It's all working perfectly.

You just have to make sure that all the farmers point to the same folder. I achieved this over  the network by mapping the shared folder to a drive letter on each of the London machines.

I also put the Farmer software in the Startup folder so that it launches automatically.

I found that even if you don't want to use the host computer to render, you still have to have it running as a farmer and then suspend it.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Good to hear.  

That last bit is curious-- it shouldn't be behaving like that.  What happens if you don't have the farm rendering on the "host" machine?  (Host in quotes because there really isn't a single machine controlling things here-- everybody is a free agent-- anyone can write a job to the shared folder and any farmer can pick up a task.)  Anyway-- this is something I can test here.

[Peter Milner]

Maybe I'm wrong. It may have just been coincidence after setting something else up. I'll ask the guys in London to do a bit of testing.