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[jwdenzel]

So if I pre-purchase a license, it says it comes with 3 or 5 render node licenses.   I assume this means I can run TG2 on 3 or 5 other machines for the purpose of rendering only.  Can TG2 be setup to do a network render? If so, how?

Jason
aka
"He With Too Many Otherwise Useless Computers Sitting Around"

[Oshyan]

At this time you will need to use a 3rd party farm management tool with arbitrary application support for commandline renderers. TG2 includes a commandline rendering client which can be used by these tools.

- Oshyan

[jwdenzel]

Thanks.  As long as it works. In many ways I prefer using a 3rd party render manager that I may already be familiar with.

Is the command line tool documented anywhere yet?

Also, how does TG2 allow the work to be divided up?  I mean, if "n" number of clients all open the same scene file to do a shared render, then how is the work spread across multiple machines? I know some tools will have each render node work on certain frames.  This is fine for animation.  But if they are all working on a large, single frame render, how is the work split up?

One last thing...

If anybody wants a good primer on setting up a render farm with spare PC's lying around, here's one I found.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1847365,00.asp
The meat and potatoes is here....
http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_image/10/0,1425,sz=1&i=104241,00.gif

Jason

[Oshyan]

There is a commandline documentation file in the Technology Preview install directory under /docs/command_line.txt

Generally speaking you would divide up the work by frames. This would be easier to do because you could just use the commandline to directly call a particular frame for rendering and this is most compatible with render managers. However if you took a little bit of time you could setup multiple crop renders manually, saving as separate project files and potentially have your render manager deal with starting them all up on the different machines. I'm not sure if what you work with is quite that flexible, but I think there are some tools that support doing this.

Note that the commandline on the Mac version is not functioning currently but we are working on a fix.

- Oshyan

[sashley]

Is there free software that you could recommend for farm rendering on the PC? unofficially. I have access to a large bank of computers and would like to use them to render out scenes in a shorter amount of time.

Thanks!
-s

[Dark Fire]

Is there free software that you could recommend for farm rendering on the PC? unofficially. I have access to a large bank of computers and would like to use them to render out scenes in a shorter amount of time.

Thanks!
-s

I wrote some free Terragen-specific render farm software - you can get it on my website. Unfortunately, it only works with the old Terragen at the moment. I am planning to update it so it works with TG2, but I am waiting until I have a good idea of how TG2 works and what people will want my software to be able to do. Thanks to the nice new 'TGD' file format, the new version will be able to do a lot more than the old one. Also, unfortunately, my software splits the work between computers by frames/pictures - I have not yet worked out an efficient way of splitting frames/pictures between computers. That means that it is not good if you only want to render one huge picture.

[sashley]

Thanks I'll check that out and look for your updates in the future. But I would be looking to have multiple computers help calculate one image at a time.

I was investigating other software when I realized our company has multiple copies of Backburner from our Max 9 licenses, anyone know if this would be compatible?

Thanks again.

-S

[Dark Fire]

This link may be helpful. I've never used GPU but from what it says on the introduction page ('...allows users to share CPU-resources...is able to get CPU-cycles from other clients on the network system...') it seems to share CPU cycles rather than assign the rendering of a frame to a computer.

[sashley]

Thanks, I'll give this a shot as well. But I was thinking that your tool could come in handy if its geared for TG2, have each machine take on a seperate frame, especially if I'm only rendering four frames to create a skybox.

Do you have a timelime when you might release your network renderer?

-S

[Dark Fire]

A lot of the features need to be tweaked in some way or another so I think I will be looking at a release date between February and April (depending on how much time I have over the next few months). However, I can just skip straight to where Terragen is executed in the program and change the command line structure. I could then simply add disabled flags to all of the inputs for features no longer used by TG2 (or not yet rewritten for TG2), tweak a few bits here and there, and hopefully have an extreme beta version out tonight. I'll have a go now...

[sashley]

That would be very helpful, even to just a try a extreme beta version might be enough. Thanks! Let me know if you manage to post somehting.

-S

[Dark Fire]

I have thrown together an extreme beta version - click here to get it. I'm not sure if it works yet - I am reluctant to try it because I have not yet had time to update the method it uses to store data which means that it will conflict with the version for the old Terragen. I will hopefully update the data storage method and test it in a while (Little Britain is on TV).

[Dark Fire]

I have fixed all errors I know of with my software, but I seem to be encountering a problem with the command line. Terragen totally ignores my commands. Here is the way my program calls tgdcli.exe:

Code:

'"$TGLoc" "$TGDLoc" -hide -exit -r -f $R0'

$TGLoc = Location of tgdcli.exe
$TGDLoc = Location of TGD file

I could understand this problem if some negative feedback was thrown at me, but tgdcli.exe proceeds to bring up a command-prompt box, happily throws a load of 'loading' and 'creating' information at me and then starts the main GUI with a blank project. The old Terragen worked with a very similar system, and this system conforms to the command line instructions supplied with T2TP. What is going on?

[sashley]

I'll give it a shot and see. Thanks!

-Steve

[Dark Fire]

Let me know if it works for you. If it does, it's probably because I'm using the free version, if it does not, hopefully Oshyan will drop by and explain why I can't control Terragen from the command line at all.