are render farms merely a dream?

[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.

[Sergio]

Originally Posted by XxMORTteam11xX

We've been using ppl's home and school computers. this year we may bring in the newly built computers some of us made. There may be more people that have these computers on our team that i don't know of.
2 computers
Q6600 Quad Core- OC'd to 1) 3.35ghz 2) 3.6ghz
2 gigs of RAM each
2+ terabytes total storage
Dual 8600GT and 1 with 8800

I'm not sure if the animation team even asked for better compies, but we'll bring them in if need be.

We do need em btw.

(i'm on MORT's animation team btw...)

[adamrw91]

Hey if u guys really want a render farm there are online ones. and some of them arent that expensive. they work great with verry large projects but very poor for small ones.

[mikemax]

you think thats bad...we have a dell laptop that is shared with programing and thats it...we have 3ds max on about 3 different computers total but only the laptop runs it efficiantly but that randomly freezes. and the other computeres only have 3ds max 8!...we havent even had a chance to submit anything cuz we cant get ahold of the computer long enough to do anything!
hopefully this years different

[cbale2000]

Originally Posted by mikemax

... and the other computeres only have 3ds max 8!...

Only have 8? We're still running version 7 on our teams PCs. I didn't even know they had come out with a newer version than 8.


I think they need to modify either the rules about what software you can use to allow for other programs that may run better for some or make some version of 3Ds Max that is FIRST specific and/or low requirements (As I recall they did something like this for making video game mods). I'm sure a good portion of teams don't have access to the kinds of super computers these things are starting to require, and are thus left out of the animation aspect of the competition.

[richalex2010]

There is Gmax, which was made by discreet for game mods, but has now been discontinued by Autodesk. If someone has a copy of Flight Simulator 9/2004, you can get it without downloading from disk one (IIRC). You can also download it from Turbosquid.
Gmax is pretty much a watered down version of 3DS Max, with no rendering ability. I'm not sure about types of modeling, but it at least has polygon modeling, so you would be able to model and animate with that. I'm not sure what the rules have to say about Gmax, though.

We have five or six decent robotics computers in the teacher lead's classroom; four for general use, one as a data dump, and one that is reserved for a server (probably just Jabber, but possibly our website as well) if/when we get permission. We would also be able to use the other computers in that room (at least twenty others) for rendering, if anyone on our team ever feels like learning the software (I consider myself reasonably proficient, having used it for a bit under a year, but nobody else has even tried to start using it).

[EHaskins]

I just built my new PC.

2.4ghz Core 2 Quad(it seems stable at 3.2ghz, but I haven't had time to stress test it at that speed so its still at only 2.4)
4gb ram
500gb hdd
8600gts(over clocked)

[cbale2000]

From what I have found in my own attempts is that the only thing you really need for a render farm (assuming you're using the function in 3Ds Max to do it) is computers capable of running 3Ds Max (preferably with the primary computer being more powerful).

Other than that, it should be more a matter of numbers to increase performance, the more computers you have, and the better they are, the faster it will go.



Now if only my team had more than one computer that can actually run 3Ds Max (and only version 7 too...).

[addictedMax]

Originally Posted by vivek16

dont use max but I want to complain anyway

at home:
pentium 833 mhz processer
512 mb ram
40 gb hard drive
decent monitor although it is well over 6 years old.

school ones are decent

-vivek

Vivek and you got that nice new shiny laptop.
Meh You can render on anything. I did 40 hours of rendering last year. (5.8 million polys dont ask)

[BuddyB309]

Originally Posted by addictedMax

Vivek and you got that nice new shiny laptop.
Meh You can render on anything. I did 40 hours of rendering last year. (5.8 million polys dont ask)

oh but WHY did you have 5.8 million polys?

[addictedMax]

Originally Posted by BuddyB309

oh but WHY did you have 5.8 million polys?

Look in the Tree topic, Pete.

[Mazin]

I used a Celeron tower and a Turion x2 laptop for my animation. Before you start madly monopolizing computers, you should probably try getting your render times down.

You shouldn't need 30min+ render times, especially with NTSC. I had all my render times < 1 min./frame.

[Loce Imica Morn]

Hey i was in a CGSociety thread and i found this little link:http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1815797,00.asp Might come in handy for this thread.

Good luck,

John M.

[ea6b607]

Well our team is across two high schools, and both have cad labs. Got backburner all set up and have a render farm now of 54 core 2 dou e6600's so fast.