[Bf-committers] Internal renderer question (help)

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

Although very useful, I don't recommend such coding project to someone  
who's not totally familiar to how Blender works, and especially the  
rendering system.

I've done a lot of work to get Blender rendering in threads (SDL),  
doing that involved a lot of very painful code rewrites. It now renders  
a scanline based thread. Having threads running for entire Parts is at  
this moment a task I won't even try myself.

I have no active knowledge about the consequences of "MPI" or  
"distributed memory". You could really first tell us the functionality  
you require, before already having decided on crucial technical  
implementation issues. :)

For example; for a cluster you can just start up individual blender  
binaries, and signal each running process to render a single part.  
That's not shared memory, but quite efficient. (This feature is not  
implemented yet, although it's possible with a hacky trick already).

If 'distributed memory' means that you run threads that share memory, I  
recommend you to not even try!

-Ton-


On 6 Oct, 2005, at 4:45, Trevor McDonell wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I've been playing around with the last release code, adding a wrapper  
> for the parts rendering system so that each part is rendered on a  
> separate node of a cluster (via MPI).
>
> Since this is all distributed memory stuff, I need to broadcast the  
> scene data and such to all the nodes. So could anyone point me to  
> which structs/variables/etc. I should be sending.
>
> At the moment, the renderings pretty much exit immediately and just  
> return zeros (black), so I guess it doesn't have any of the  
> scene/object data? Where (variable) is this located (hoping this is  
> not too much of a silly question).
>
> Kind Regards
> -Trevor
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-committers mailing list
> Bf-committers at projects.blender.org
> http://projects.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
--
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation ton at blender.org  
http://www.blender.org