I have never set up a “render farm” before, but since my G5 died a histrionic death
last Friday and I may get a Mac Pro (2X2.8), I was thinking that I would set one up.

I will check manual as to how to do this…

Q1) If I fix the G5 and it runs 10.4.11, and get a Mac Pro running 10.5… will that
be cool to send renders to the G5?

Q2) If I need rendering support, like at another location, how do I do that?  Is the
“animation control file” transferrable to other computers outside my render-farm
network? 

Many thanks all,

Richard

Richard,
Ian has a great video tutorial on setting up multi-processor machines (and network slaves) here… http://homepage.mac.com/cake_or_death/Rama-synced2.mov

Setting up both machines will have a real advantage for animations.  For stills the bottle neck will be the transfer speed between machines, and the number of hard drives you have.  If all your slaves on one machine are on one hard-drive, then all the processors deal with files on one hard drive.  If you have multiple hard-drives, put the slaves on different drives.  Then you will get the benefit of each slave using the hard drive it’s on.

For your ‘render-farm’, try and either connect the machines directly by ethernet, or get a very fast router.  The file transfer between machines will be very slow unless you take advantage of the gigabyte ethernet.

As far as transfer between machines not on the network.. I think you need to be on network to send to a render-farm.  Otherwise you need to have animator on the machine, and render that way.

Good luck,
Yon

In addition to what Yon has said, you can in fact render ‘over the internet’ (by inputting the remote computer’s IP address and then managing that machine via Remote access), however, you best have very quick internet speeds because if you need to transfer a few hundred megabites of assets over, it’ll take a while!

Best,
Ian

Yon and Ian,

Thank you very much for getting back…

G5 is back online, so I will attempt to get Renderama going in the coming weeks.

Thanks for the tutorial, also!

Richard

Hi Ian and Yon and others,

Many thanks for the tips and tutorials on render farming…

Set-up:  The main EIAS project w all files is on my Mac Pro 2x2.8 QC Intel.  Renderama is launched and
config’d on Mac Pro.  The two slaves are config’d on G5 Powermac 2x2ghz.  Both machines cabled into an
Apple Extreme wireless router.  Mac Pro runs Leopard.  G5 runs Tiger.

Seems to work like a dream… !

I don’t get “half frames” however, like in Ian’s tutorial .  Rather, I get each slave doing an alternate frame,
and they do them in sequence.  With Mac Pro “local” camera enabled, I had three cameras rendering.

Thanks again!

Richard

Richard,

I haven’t tried this yet, as it’s been a while since I’ve had multiple machines, but I’m wondering if it would be faster to connect two machines with the gigabyte ethernet, as opposed to the airport.  I’m not sure if you would need a router with only two machines, just the right ethernet cable.  Also remember you should be able to run at least three slave with that set-up.

Yon

PS I like the watercolors on your site a lot.  The about link is ‘not found 404’

Oh, thanks Yon, about the watercolors… !  (yeah website still under construction)

Will try the GB ethernet cable… Thanks for your advice on this!  What a time saver
to have multiple cameras running. 

Richard

Hi Yon and Ian et al…

¿ My primary is a Mac Pro 2X2.8 Quad Core Intel… can I set this up as eight slaves, or just two… ?

Renderama is really awesome, working great.

Thanks,

Richard