Process for rendering Terragen on a farm

[Darknight]

Hey guys,

I have a farm set up at my company, to run Terragen. But I understand that GI can be a problem and it is recommended to use a GI Cache for rendering across a farm.

However, the question is this - Can I render out just the GI Cache? If yes, should this be done locally?

Thanks,
Mukul.

[ajcgi]

I've done both locally and on a farm before.
If you set the GI to write GI Cache instead of None, it will only write the GI.
Save that scene, render every 5 frames or similar on the farm, then change GI cache to read GI, point it at the correct location and blend between the frames.

[Darknight]

Thanks ajcgi! I am not rendering an animation. I am rendering an insane huge 16k x 8k render. And without using GI Cache, I had an issue where each tile that got rendered in a separate cpu came back with slightly different light values, resulting in blocky chunks with varying values.

So In my case then, I would enable write to GI Cache in the render node, render that locally and then, after that's completed, change the setting render node to read GI Cache and let it render on the farm. Is that right?

[attachimg=1]

[yossam]

Did you pause your render?


http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,21839.15.html


See the second page, Matts' reply..........

[Darknight]

Haha I had that issue when I rendered locally and quickly learned to not pause yet But this one was rendered over a Render farm with no pausing. Unless some one else paused it without my knowledge. Hmmmm...

[Dune]

Are you using PixelPlow? They had that issue before, but I think it has been solved now.

[Oshyan]

There are 2 ways to handle GI caching for large single-image renders distributed across multiple machines. You can either render the entire GI cache on a single machine, which is much easier, but does not take full advantage of multiple machines to render the GI portion, and then simply load this single GI cache on all machines for the final renders of each tile. OR you can render individual GI cache "tiles" on each machine with sequentially numbered file names, and then make *all* these files available to *every* machine and specify the GI cache to load as a file number range, e.g. gicache_%04d.gic, and use "equal blend within range" for the blending setting. The latter approach allows you to distribute the rendering of GI caches across your farm, but is more complicated to manage.

- Oshyan

[ajcgi]

Haha. What Oshyan said. 

[Darknight]

Thanks a lot Oshyan! That is extremely useful information for my needs!