Network Rendering Scecifications

[BangelOz]

Are there actually final specifications about Network Rendering? Will the be exact descriptions in the final release/doku?

In Post http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=4502.0
was said that TG2 will work with existing network rendering solutions. But How? I've heard about professional renderers which cost a lot of mony. Are there any free solutions that are suitable for beginners? When I hear this in context with the command line interface in TG2 it doesn't seem to be an easy way to do this. Perhaps I'm a bit spoiled with the network rendering functions in my Vue, but I think the highest version of TG2 with animation should have this as a similar thing. I'm hoping too, it will become more comfortable to create animations in the comming updates.

[Mandrake]

Maxwell's Indigo, is the only free solution I've seen. Free plugin for a few modeling programs
http://www.indigorenderer.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

But free farms, I haven't seen any. Someone was working on a plugin But I'm not sure what became of that.

[Oshyan]

What is referred to is that the Deep and Deep + Animation versions of TG2 can be called from the commandline, which can then be automated by a number of free and commercial render automation/network rendering solutions. I think Condor is one example of a free option: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/

The Animation functions are still considered "in development" at this point and will be improved in the future. Whether we can provide a full render manager within TG2 is not yet decided, but it should get easier to do this in the future one way or another.

- Oshyan

[BangelOz]

What is referred to is that the Deep and Deep + Animation versions of TG2 can be called from the commandline...

The Animation functions are still considered "in development" at this point and will be improved in the future. Whether we can provide a full render manager within TG2 is not yet decided, but it should get easier to do this in the future one way or another.

- Oshyan

The Animation functions in development are not the problem. At this time i will only make simple camera-drivings through the world like in TG 0.9 with terranim. Trying to animate almost everything would need a lot of new functions in the future, animating a very big would with a lot of objects will require 64-bit support because of the big RAM consumption, the possibility to process poser animations would be one interesting thing and i think animating plants/whole populations would require specialal files of them and so on.

I didn't find anything about the commandline in connection with network rendering. I hope it will come an easy to use workaround/documentation with the final release - i don't know anything about the use of external renderers  -  a full render manager sometime that would be great.

[Oshyan]

The commandline is only available and documented with the Deep or Deep + Animation version, so if you don't have that, you won't be able to see what's possible or work with a 3rd party render manager.

- Oshyan

[BangelOz]

The commandline is only available and documented with the Deep or Deep + Animation version, so if you don't have that, you won't be able to see what's possible or work with a 3rd party render manager.

- Oshyan

I purchased the version with animation but i can only see a win_command_line.txt in the install-directory with some basic options.

[Oshyan]

Yes, that's the documentation for the commandline. It is not specific to animating. You would use the simple commandline options such as specifying a TGD to load and a frame number for rendering, in concert with a render queue manager like Condor, to distribute frame rendering across systems. Use of the commandline for generalized batch management is common in the industry.

- Oshyan

[BangelOz]

I downloaded condor, took a look in the over 900 page manual and must say - i don't understand anything about the config of it and the TG commandline connection...

[Oshyan]

I haven't used Condor myself. DrQueue is another option you might look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DrQueue Again I haven't used it. We don't currently have a recommended 3rd party management solution but I know there are several that work.

- Oshyan

[Njen]

(Been a while since I have posted here, hehe)

I used Condor while working on the 3D animated Disney film, The Wild. It was extremely robust, but there were dedicated sys admins looking after it.

As for command line possibilities, 3DS Max's Backburner (while not free if you don't own 3DS Max) can receive jobs via the command line. Just the other day, I got The compositing program Nuke, working with Backburner.

To submit to Backburner, the following syntax would work (I have not tested this yet with a Terragen job, though):

cmdjob -jobname:"<job name>" -manager:<manager address> "<Terragen arguments and parameters>"

You can leave the manager address as default if there is only one on your network, but if not, an ip address is required (example: 192.168.0.0). Then for the Terragen specific parameters, I am guessing you would need to provide the path to the executable (if not defined in an environment), and a path to the file to render (example: "C:\Program Files\Terragen 2 Deep Edition (Beta)" "C:\TerragenJobs\TerragenJob.tgd"), and then include any parameter switches between the path to the executable and the file to render.

[BangelOz]

Perhaps i should say at this time that i'm doing renderings only for private things. Such high pricing programs like 3ds max, photoshop and others i don't own. It seems, the only thing that remains to me is to wait and hoping that there will be an integrated render manager in TG in later releases. until that i can only do network renderings in vue and carrara. It's interesting what's all possible to do. But the many rendering functions are already enough. Doing Network and commandline programming in addition would blow my head up. The main usage of TG2 takes me already down enough.