Is network rendering implemented at this point? I just got access to another dual-core PC (though slower). I'd love to be able to speed up these rendertimes.
As far as I know, no. Or at least not officially I think some have found a work around.
One workaround at the moment is to render cropped regions on different computers and then combine the images later. If you try and run two instances on a dual core, just make sure you have enough RAM for both instances, but if you do it can be a big help. The other possible gotcha is that GI may give you different results on each cropped portion of the render, especially if one part of the image has more shadows than the other.
There is no built-in support for network rendering at this time but you can use external render management tools with the commandline version to effectively automate the process. Distributing frames of an animation is the easiest thing to do, of course. Distributing tiles of a single still frame would take more manual effort and as BigBen mentioned GI can be a problem on tile edges. In the future when multithreading is implemented it will be much easier to do distributed rendering of single frames.
- Oshyan
Sounds good.
Many thanks to all for the information.