Render Farm Build for Twilight and Kerkythea

[bradleyabbott82]

And More...

[bradleyabbott82]

And One More...

[Fletch]

Looking great!

[TSPCo]

I believe there would be a large market for this type of application of computers. My renders are OK, not great but OK, for my current purposes Ok is good enough for me. I have tried a couple of multi pass renders but...1 hour per pass and 10000 passes is not something I will be able to accomplish. I have one computer with SketchUp and Twilight render on it. I have thought about using a couple of multi-core servers to render with. But financially for me it just is not feasible. This likes like a real good project to me!

[bradleyabbott82]

Couple more of the Restaurants...

Enjoy - Comments welcome

Bradley

[bradleyabbott82]

And 1 more view... 4 total

Bradley

[Fletch]

but...1 hour per pass and 10000 passes is not something I will be able to accomplish.

Typically a rendering done on single core needs only about 350-400 passes to be client-ready, the 10000 is an arbitrary number because unbiased renderings can run forever. You stop them when YOU think it's ready. On dual core, only 180-200 passes are needed. On quad core, 100-120, on 8 threads, about 50-60 passes.
This depends on the scene of course, the more direct light in any scene the faster it will be client-ready. Conversely, if there is only sun and sky lighting the scene, no direct light, and the camera is inside of a building, there is little light to work with, and it takes longer to converge to the solution. (Of course there are sky portals in Twillight to speed this up. See the master list of resources in the red carpet section of the forum for details, or read the user manual.)

Bradley, those look excellent. I think the glasses on the table detract from the render realism, the model of the glass does not seem accurate, but also the glass material looks strange, dark, or something. But that's a minor detail in a big beautiful image. Also the plates on the tables are segmented, so they do not work for close up rendering.

[bradleyabbott82]

Scene 2 - 18hours. NO POST-PRO AT ALL.

Bradley

[mstepuch]

Okay Folks... The farm is up and running... here is a test on a model that took 60hours to get "relatively clear" on my 8thread corei-7 3.2Ghz machine a few weeks ago... The first image is 60hours on 1 box (from a few weeks ago), the second image is a conglomeration of 6 machines (3.8Ghz - 8 threads x 5 machines - 152Ghz total power) over a 40 minute render. I have not yet REALLY overclocked the machines (they will eventually be running 4.5Ghz each = 180Ghz), so this is a pretty good indication of how FAST this thing will be... The third image is the output of ONE of the clients (so you can see the SUBSTANTIAL clearing effected by a forced stop/commit @ 40minutes in the second image).

I'm having a bit of an issue with the KT net-render though - If I have the Network Log Window open during rendering, at the first attempted commit, the host CRASHES, gives the standard "KT crashed we saved your work" message, but the clients keep running. I just restarted the host, restarted the hosted render and forced a commit by stopping the clients and the contributed data was sent through (obviously since the second image posted here only ran for 60 seconds and is OBVIOUSLY a conglomerated contributed render from the clients)... Thoughts anyone? It seems if I never open the Network Log window (which means I cant see my commits), that I don't have a problem, but if I open it (or have it open), KT crashes during a commit... The COMMITS ARE HAPPENING - I JUST CAN'T OPEN THE LOG TO SEE OR KT CRASHES...

Hello,

First of all - grat job !

I try to set up render on 4 machines - all connected via LogMeIn Hamachi.
Three of them are in local network and 1 remote connected via internet.
All works great except that i have the same issue with Server crashes when i have opened "Network Log" window.

What could it be ?

All machines run under Win 7 x64 and Kerkythea Boost 64
I can remotely set up render using Tight VNC soft and scene file located on mapped network drive.

Regards
Michal.

[Fletch]

Problems with net rendering in Kerkythea should be reported/discussed in their forum.