[Bf-cycles] Idea for collaboratory rendering (multiple rendering machines on a sigle frame)

Brecht Van Lommel brechtvanlommel at pandora.be
Mon Jan 21 14:34:16 CET 2013


This can be a useful way to do things, in fact renderfarm.fi can
already work this way I think (the seed value was originally added on
their request). Any render farm software like netrender or brender
could implement this, currently they still don't support multiple
slaves cooperating on one frame though. I'm not sure if this is
necessarily simpler than tile based rendering, from the implementation
point of view it does not seem much easier, and there's the issue that
renders will not give the exact same results due to different random
numbers being used.

In any case, when we are talking about interactive network rendering
built into cycles itself, then tiles would still be the easiest
solution since it already distributes things that way across CPU cores
and GPU's, and combining the render results is not really the hard
part of the implementation anyway.

Brecht.

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 3:24 AM, Sam Vila <samvila at gmail.com> wrote:
> I just had an idea of how to get multiple computers to work together, I'm
> not a developer but maybe this could bring you new way to have this feature
> inside cycles, the basic idea is to use a different the seed option in
> cycles for each computer and allow the computers to send the actual
> calculated image into a common direction (this could be a folder or to the
> master service with the network add-on). Actually the main problem is that
> you cannot save or access the frame being calculated until is finished but
> if we could have an option to save that frame even if the render isn't
> finished that would allow to send the actual calculation into a common
> folder and then join all the non-finished images by a post-processing
> process. Do you get my point? that way we could use multiple machines to
> work on a single frame. I know there's some other options (proper tile
> rendering for multiple machines) but these other options requieres much more
> work while my suggestion requires less effort in my opinion until the tile
> rendering or other more complicated method is ready.
>
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