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[school-discuss] Render Farm finally working



Hi there everyone!

It took me a whole year, but finally I have an operational render farm.  I have
been to the ends of the earth and back looking for the solution and naturally
the most simple process is what works.

One computer serves as the server and seven others are connected as nodes on
their own network.  The server boots to the Quantain Live DVD. 

http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html 

Then you start the OpenMosix terminal server.  Turn on the nodes (which are set
to boot from the network).

Mount the hard disk you are using for storage.  I use a flash drive to move the
Blender files to the server.  Open the Blender file and make sure it renders to
a directory on the server's hard drive.  Note the number of frames.

Attached is the rendering-with-OpenMosix script I found in the Dynebolic
documentation.

Move the render script to the same directory as the blender file.  Make the
render script executable.  If you have 300 frames and 7 computer nodes you will
type the following command.

./render coolanimation.blend 1 300 7

It will then say:

Rendering 299 images from coolanimation.blend on 7 nodes.
Tasks forked, network rendering in progress.
Job started at: 20-5-09 03:34:46
Please wait while rendering . . . 

It still requires a bit of tweeking but the basic functions work fine.  We are
busy rendering student work.  Yipee!

Marilyn


:)

Attachment: render.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data