are render farms merely a dream?

[galewind]

do you have to utilize your licenses on the machines used in the render farm though? I was always afraid to try to use our precious licenses on lab machines if I had students who wanted to work at home.

[vivek16]

Ok, My new lappie which will be here in 10 days or so is:

dell vostro 1500

15.4" lcd screen
1.6ghz c2d
2gb ram
160 gb hd
128mb Nvidia GeForce 8400 graphics card

-vivek

[Suneet]

Yup, intel quad core processors are practically small render farms on a chip! And they're relatively cheap. I've not made FIRST animations for many years, but I've used my Q6600 quad core with 3ds and it IS amazing comapared to P4 single-cores I've used before.

If you build it yourself, a quad core setup is pretty affordable!

[geeknerd99]

We've got like, 10 or so P4s that have been set up into a render farm for Max. The funny thing is, some people don't know this, so they'll be on a web page or something and this window will pop up and start doing the passes and they'll panic.

[cbale2000]

Originally Posted by galewind

do you have to utilize your licenses on the machines used in the render farm though? I was always afraid to try to use our precious licenses on lab machines if I had students who wanted to work at home.

Unfortunately you would have to do that yes, unless your team or school just goes out and buys a few permanent copies.

If only Autodesk still gave out the permanent licenses like they used to.

[stevek]

Originally Posted by galewind

do you have to utilize your licenses on the machines used in the render farm though? I was always afraid to try to use our precious licenses on lab machines if I had students who wanted to work at home.

I believe you only need one licence on the control machine and the rest are just render nodes which you can install on as many computers as you want.

The main thing is you need enough RAM to load the scenes (256MB that one of you mentioned will be a hair losing proposition). The processing may be slow but if you spread it on multple machines it is worth it.

Our Team had a beautiful computer lab a few yrs ago, then the computers got old so all the students on the animation team brought in ther comps and setup their own network. The only time we needed the render farm was for the finals. (You can always use the 30day trial for the control machine in the LAB if all your MAX licenses are used up on other computers.)

Ofcourse the LAB isnt allowed to use the software outside of the team use!!! So read the usage rules on FIRSTPLACE.

MY ADVICE- Do some test renders along the way and make notes of render times- You want to test different areas of the scene because some may require more rendering time than others. Then take an average and multiply by the number of frames in your animation (30fps x 30sec- 900frames => if you do any layering or compositing you may require more rendering frames depending on the effects and complexity) so the Point is figureout how much time it takes to render and make sure you can do in the the alotted time. IF you dont have a lab or render farm- you may need to ask other to borrow their computers and setup your own.

EXAMPLE- If you have 900 Frames: if you have images and effects and such and you figure out that you average 5min a frame (hopefully you're closer to 1-2 min but its very possible to but much higher) 5(min/frm) x 900(frms) = 4500(min)/60(min/hr) = 75(hrs) / 24(hrs/Day) = 3Day(+)

If you have 3 computers at the same basic speed- your down to 1 Day (25hrs). If you have 10 Computers, your done in 7.5 hrs.

SO if you can use or create a render farm- its worth its weight in gold- less stress (once its up and running!!!) and more time to work the animation itself.

Good Luck All!

[Setsanto]

From what I have read, only the main computer needs an authorized copy of 3dsm. The rest can all have unauthorized copies of it, all you have to do is somehow get the install file on that comp (what I did is I downloaded the program from Firstbase to a network hard drive, then connected to that hard drive from different comps). You wount be able to use 3dsm on thos comps, but you can render with them.

~Setsanto

[galewind]

I suppose that how I should have asked my question was:

Is there a program that can be installed on a machine that was a network rendering node that didn't include the full install (and thus necessitate a license) of max.

From what I'm gathering, no, but unlicensed copies or trial copies will work?

[Setsanto]

That is correct. I'm afraid that some version of 3ds Max has to be installed.

~Setsanto

[Corporat]

Our tech room has about a dozen Dell computers, whose stats I do not know, but I do know they are all pretty powerful and about half have some version of max running on them. We tried setting up a render farm once, but we weren't really equipped for it. Plus, the cad team didn't like the fact that we were monopolizing the comps. We just have to render on another teammate's home computer.