[Bf-committers] For the record: the Blender Render Deamon!

[Campbell Barton]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 12:29 AM, Carsten Wartmann <cw at blenderbuch.de> wrote:
> Ton Roosendaal schrieb:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I keep wondering why no good, useful and simple render farms exist...
>> apparently such systems are never coded by people who actually use it
>> in a (local) studio setup. ;)
>
> Sometimes I also do linear animation. For rendering I use "Farmer Joe"
> which pretty much works as you describe it and uses perl (I would prefer
> Python, more natural for Blender ;-)) and a own webserver for the GUI
> (or a Blender Python Script)
>
> This works very good.
>
> However, the big point of critics for such a setup is that you need a
> shared disk or network folder. This can be tendious in some networks and
> will not work (without much hassle) through routers or the internet.
>
> When you already have a shared folder you can also use the Touch/No
> Overwrite without much effort to network render.
>
> All in Python or even better integrated into Blender, no shared folders,
> would be my dream. The daemons announce their selfs by broadcasting. And
> of course bucket rendering of big images ;-) And fool proof.
>
> Carsten

Being able to extract start and end frames from the blendfile without
loading it is pretty useful for generating jobs, for peach I wrote a
py module thats easy to reuse
release/scripts/bpymodules/blend2renderinfo.py

I'm told Touch/NoOverwrite could be improved by using semaphores, to
reduce the risk of 2 PC's rendering the same file, Intrr also
suggested using directories instead of files for touching since they
have similar advantages without explicitly setting semaphores for a
file.