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Terragen™ Mac and Xgrid Terragen Mac v0.9 comes with an Xgrid Kit which makes it easy to use Terragen with Xgrid. This page gives a brief overview of Xgrid and how it's useful with Terragen. For more information please see the "Using the Xgrid Kit" PDF in the XGrid Kit folder of the Terragen Mac v0.9 download. Please note that Xgrid only works on the Mac. What is Xgrid ? Xgrid is a technology from Apple which makes it easy to turn a number of machines on a network into a cluster which can make light work of tasks involving heavy duty computation, tasks which would take much longer to complete on a single machine. You may already be familiar with this kind of thing if you've taken part in the SETI@home project, Folding@Home project or distributed.net projects like the RC5 challenge. In the specific case of Terragen, you could say Xgrid is used to create a render farm. Xgrid makes it easy to set up a cluster of your own, using machines on your own network, whether they're connected via ethernet or wirelessly. Xgrid doesn't require any network setup, you just install it on each machine you want to be part of the cluster and you're pretty much ready to go. The Xgrid application, used on one machine, lets you set up tasks and automatically takes care of dividing that task into smaller ones which it sends to the individual machines in the cluster. When the machines have finished their tasks it collects the results together for you. All of this work is done for you by the Xgrid application. You can visit Apple's Xgrid webpage for more information. How is Xgrid useful with Terragen ? You can use Terragen with Xgrid to speed up animation rendering by having Xgrid spread the load of rendering the frames in a native Terragen script across multiple machines. Even if you only have another older slower machine you can still use it to reduce animation rendering times ( as long as it can run at least OS X 10.3 ). The cluster used for testing Terragen with Xgrid consisted of a 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4, a G4 533 desktop and a G3 500 iBook. The test animation took a little over 2 hours to render using just the PowerBook G4, but using Xgrid to spread the work over the cluster reduced that time to just under an hour. You don't require a fast network either, the machines in the test cluster were networked wirelessly using the original 802.11b AirPort. Another important point is that if you have a dual processor Mac, you don't need a network at all to get a benefit from using Xgrid. As you might be aware, Terragen only uses one processor while rendering, leaving your other processor unused. Xgrid detects that your machine has two processors and will allow two tasks to be run at the same time on a dual processor machine. This means that if you use Xgrid to render an animation, both processors will be used and two frames can be rendered at the same time. This will cut the time needed to render an animation in half. Please note that at this time Terragen can only be used with Xgrid on OS X 10.3 and newer, although Xgrid itself will run on OS X 10.2.8. You can also only use native Terragen scripts with the Xgrid Kit provided in the Terragen Mac v0.9 download, and not AppleScripts.