Parallel processing for 3dmax

[Jay Lundy]

Originally posted by Kyle Fenton
That is an incorrect statement. I think that you are trying to imply that if you combine your computer processors through your network it would make one big processor. What Network rendering does is that it sends the file to all of the available computers and distribute the work evenly. The rendering process will take the same amount of time, but overall it will be a shorter time because instead of one computer doing one big job, it is multiple computers doing little jobs.

No, I think that they said they have the equivalent of a 160 ghz - 220 ghz processor. If their network can render an animation in the same amount of time as a single 160 ghz chip (if there were such a thing), then I don't see why it couldn't be considered 160 ghz (how else are you supposed to measure the speed of a network in a situation like this?)

As for the network rendering, the problem with doing it with 3dsmax is it can't be used to render animations, only each individual frame. It still is extremely useful if you have a program like Adobe Premiere that can connect all these frames together because in a typical 30 second animation there are 900 frames (@30 fps), and if each frame takes 5 minutes to render on a 1 ghz comp (if you're lucky!) then thats 4500 minutes or 75 hours! If you have 200 1 ghz machines, then it only takes about 23 minutes. Add about an hour onto that for combining the frames and I think the advantages of server rendering are obvious.

We haven't ever used network rendering (we don't have enough computers to make the effort worth it) but I bet you could find some tutorials on it on the web with some searching. 3dsmax makes it fairly simple to do network rendering, you just need to know how to set it up. My 3dsmax 4 Bible has a whole chapter on it so if you really need help, I could try but I don't think it would easy to pass on the information without scanning it or something which would be illegal...

Oh and by the way, I did a quick search on how to do network rendering on google and found several companies that will render your animations on their own render farms (for a price, of course.) However, if you look at some of their network specifications, they don't come any where near 160 ghz. How did you get so many computers and from who?