Network Render design
Chris:
>> I was wondering about the practicality of putting my PAR and Magneto
>> Optical disk (and probably a CD-ROM) into the 386 system and using it as a
>> common network resource that all of the rendering machines could get at.
I'd vote yes for the CD and the MO disk. The PAR, being a single tasking
device, would not be happy being accessed by more than one machine at a time,
so I wouldn't try to either read from or write to it in this configuration.
>> Will the software that I've heard about for assembling files onto the PAR
>> from around the net work for this setup where 3DS isn't running on the
>> machine with the PAR in it?
Yes, NDUMP.EXE would work, however, I'd recommend running the PAR on one of
your Pentiums, using the newer PAROUT.IXP – much cleaner, and with the included
PARCTL.PXP to control playback, you'd have the best of both worlds!
>> Do those of you with render farms keep the 3DS master machine (the one
>> with the dongle) running as a master or do you set it up as a slave to
>> help with the rendering? It would look like there was some advantage to
>> maintain the ability to keep track of the net queue without having to drop
>> out of slave mode to do it.
Jamie Clay has written a neat little Windoze shareware program to monitor
network rendering from a machine not running 3D Studio – if you run Windoze on
your 386, that would be a solution.
Personally, we throw every machine 486 and above with enough memory into the
network renderings, so they are all slaving away. No problem halting one and
re-starting it, as long as you can clean the Queue before starting it again.
Greg Pyros