Building a TG3 Render Server

[ares2101]

I've had an idea floating around my head for awhile which has become more prominent in light of a persistent nvidia glitch with my main PC and was wondering if anyone could give me an outline of how/if I could do this.  What would it take to make a simple render node for TG3?  I consider myself a very good computer person, but servers are not something I've ever done anything with.  Could I build a server I install TG3 on, log into the server from my PC and then do a project and render it with the server?  Also, how would accessing it work?  I've seen plenty of server log-ins during college and at my job, but have no idea how I would set that up.

I have old parts from my PC's previous incarnation; a motherboard with onboard video, 4 gigs of RAM, a 3.4 Ghz quad-core and a hard drive.  I take it I would just need a case, a power supply and a connection to my network, but how does this server thing work?  I like the idea of this, as it would let me do long renders, even overnight ones, and leave my PC free for writing, working on other 3D programs or gaming.  Not to mention, my living situation dictates that my PC be in my bedroom and I can't sleep with it active.

Thoughts, any pointers, stuff I missed?

[gregtee]

The simplest way to do this would be to use what we used to call back in the old days "sneakernet", meaning you literally ran from machine to machine and fired off jobs by hand, using frame offsets on each mode.  If you had five  machines you'd use a five frame offsett on each on and let them all save to the same drive folder on the network.  The reason we had to do this was because render control software didn't really exist yet outside of large facilities. 

In your situation perhaps you could look into something like this:  http://www.renderpal.com/

It's software that will allow you to slave other machines on your network assigned single frames from a master file, in your case your tgd file.  I've never used this particular package before so I can't give any details but it appears to do the same thing render control software in large facilities use to assign single frames across a network. 

[Dune]

Can't you just use your spare stuff as a separate render machine? Install only TG, your libraries and use a stick to move files to render from your working machine. That's how I work, very simple and efficient. No internet, no other software installed, nothing that takes memory.

[ares2101]

Can't you just use your spare stuff as a separate render machine? Install only TG, your libraries and use a stick to move files to render from your working machine. That's how I work, very simple and efficient. No internet, no other software installed, nothing that takes memory.

Hm, I'm beginning to think I was massively over-complicating this as that would easier to do.  Guess I better dig around and see what else I need to make a complete independent machine. 

[Bjur]

What Dune said.

Or build up a second PC aka render slave and in case of Windows just use remote desktop to control and access him with your main PC via direct cable connection or simply over w-lan.

I needed a GFXcard for installing and setup windows first as my slave CPU/PC don't have integrated graphics.
Once build up he runs now without any own graphics or monitor.

Copy and prepare a scene and assets to your slave, fire up the render.
After the render finished, get access again via remote and copy back the created image or sequence.

For this I buyed a cheap but cute little Shuttle XPC SH67H3 2.0 which offered all i needed for my old hardware parts of 8 GB ram, 120 GB HD and my low energy ivy Xeon E3-1240v.2.

BTW., would be awesome TG could do distributed rendering like C4D now.
Hey support, can you implement something like that until, hmn, let's say next week maybe!? 

[Dune]

And a small monitor can be bought very cheaply secondhand. So you can at least see something. And I have a third machine, which I could use in case of emergencies if my working machine breaks down, which is attached to the same monitor as the (third) rendering machine, but by a analog cable (there were 2 outputs, one digital and one analog). I never use them together, so I don't have to switch cables.

[mr-miley]

Hi there. Do Planetside do a render node for Linux? If so, just build your old bits into a PC, install Ubuntu Server 64bit (as it's free) and run the render node on that, hooked up to your network. I've been messing around with Ubuntu server for the last few weeks and it talks to  a windows network fine for shared folders etc. Just use something like Teamviewer (free for non-commercial use) to control Ubuntu and you don't even need a mouse, keyboard or monitor (only to get it setup)

Miles

[Oshyan]

If your 2nd computer is on a LAN with your main one, it should be quite simple. You can do it in a couple of different ways, from having a shared network folder where you save a TGD to be rendered by the 2nd computer and then use remote access software (like VNC or TeamViewer) to start the render, to more automated solutions like network render managers (some of which are available for free). You can find more about the latter in our wiki under Terragen Resources:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Terragen_Resource_List#Render_Managers

We do have a render node for Linux with Terragen 3 Professional (with or without Animation).

- Oshyan

[ares2101]

After a lightning fast delivery from Newegg, and a couple days getting Windows 7 to work (always seems to be uphill on a new build), I've got the Render Machine working.  For the moment it's all by it's lonesome, but I'm considering hooking it into my network and going the Team Viewer route as that does sound more convenient than shuttling between PCs with a stick drive.