Render Farm

[Peter Milner]

A couple of additions would be useful:

The ability to change the order of renderings waiting for processing so that you can place a more urgent job near the top of the queue.

The ability to assign specific jobs to specific farmers. This would allow you to maybe leave one or two farmers free for immediate use while the rest are working on bigger projects.

[Peter Milner]

Another useful option would be to be able to render for a certain amount of time, rather than number of passes.

If you're running a single render overnight, you may as well let it run all night rather than find out it finished in 8 hours and still needs a bit more.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

This one should be pretty easy to implement-- although we will have to be careful whether we mean total time or time/task.  For example, if you specify 10 hours and 5 tasks do you mean 50 total hours or 10 total hours (2 / task).  Determining when the thing finishes will also be tricky-- it depends on how many nodes are available to digest the thing.  Anyway-- something's workable here.

[Mike Dean]

I know this is an older post, but as I've been playing with the farm lately and very interested in it, and Peter has already started this thread I'll just add to this.

My Wishlist for the Render Farm:

Farmer:

Needs some visual feedback in the empty space - ie state information.  Would only need to be one line something like; "Unable to connect to path", "Ready", or "<filename>" that it's working on.  In conjunction with this, it would be nice when first launched that it didn't just "go" to the system tray but would go into it's "restore" mode.  This would give visual feedback of the state as well as visual feedback that it actually did launch without having to manually check the system tray.  Also, it would be very nice that if it was in a working state that it could provide a percentage complete along with the <filename> (even if it was just an estimated one).

Monitor:

For my purposes, it would be nice to be able to install this separately.  For example, I'm looking at possibly getting a license so I can utilize 5 more machines at night - however these machines would never need the monitor, only mine would.

The Automatic refresh flickering of connected machines.  I don't know why, but that drives me absolutely crazy!!

Again as with the Farmer, some sort of completion percentage alongside each task that a machine is running.

Suspend Job actually suspends the job.  I'm not sure if I did something wrong, but wanted to stop the job, told it to suspend the job, and the nodes kept on crunching away.

And finally, exactly what Peter had mentioned.  I would much rather prefer time over passes!  I have available time during the night and over the weekends on these machines - if an image only needed 8 hours and I told it to go 14 hours - it would only look that much better!