Render farm

[timytamy]

We recently started using our lab computer as a render farm. So I was wondering, has anyone else hijacked computers for a farm and what specs.

We have 18 P4 3.4Ghz (hyper-threaded) running 24/7 and another 8 that run when we are asleep and at school.

We are currently playing around with making our robot.

If anyone wants some help setting up a farm just ask. I could even could render somebody's frames. (We can only render Autodesk 3Ds Max Design files at the moment)

Thanks,
timytamy

[darkorbit]

How do you setup a render farm? like are you linking cpu power? or just having 18 seperate computers working?

[KC1AJT]

what software are you using to farm them something like boinc?

[Jeff 801]

When I set up a render farm in 3ds max I used backburner its installed with 3ds max and fully integrated

[timytamy]

We simply installed 3Ds Max Design on all the computers. It automatically installs Back Burner. We then started the Back Burner server (make sure you put the managers IP in correctly) on all the computers and the manager on the last. We then got the all the servers to connect back to the manager and we started submitting jobs. If you want to be able to control the jobs better you need to set up the Monitor in the same way as you did the servers (point them all to the managers IP)

We have it set up so that each computer render a frame each.

I would have set it up using BOINC but I didn't have much time and I didn't have full administrator access to all the computers until yesterday.

@Jeff 801: What kind of machines have you got running?

Thanks,
timytamy

[NullEntity]

If we (I :P) do an animation next year, I'll definitely ask about doing this. We have about 45 P4s that I can use overnight :D