Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Software Issues and Discussion => Topic started by: trekiej on June 11, 2007, 03:38:53 AM
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This question has probably been asked alot.
Is there a website dedicated to an Amiga Render Farm or has anyone here built one.
I have read on a site that you would have to have Queing software.
Networking for amiga is , I hear, expensive due to lack of hardware, except for using Elbox expansion boards.
Any info would be appreciated.
Thanks.
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Well, you don't really need complex software. Just let one machine render all even frames and another all odd frames. :)
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Um, how about using a single PC to replace the farm of amigas?
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Piru wrote:
Um, how about using a single PC to replace the farm of amigas?
Um, how about answering a perfectly good Amiga-related question instead of discouraging him? Maybe a PC would do it better, but if we all stopped using our Amigas for the things which other platforms do better then this site wouldn't be here.
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moto
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I am finally getting very close to having the time and all the needed equipment (which I have been collecting for many years) to build my Amiga render farm. NewTek included software with LightWave to accomplish the queing of assigning which machines will render which frames, but all rendered frames are sent to a central directory to create the desired animation.
Ethernet cards for Amigas are expensive, as you can see when you try to find them online at auctions or online stores.
I can't give you much more info until I set up my video editing room and network several of my 20 Amigas together to create my own render farm.
I have a huge investment in my equipment and software and have no plans to sell or junk my investment and purchase LightWave for the PC yet. If I can actually make some money with my existing "Hobby" equipment, then I may take that money to buy some newer software and hardware to hopefully make even more money.
I will post my progress here to let you know what I find out about setting up the render farm.
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Well, in my opinion single PC + lightwave would be
a) faster
b) cheaper
c) more energy efficient
d) more uptodate (better software, tools etc)
than render-farm of 20 Amigas.
If you have the skills to actually make money from your renders then the PC would be much more sensible investment.
@motorollin
Frankly, amiga is not very suitable for render farms, and in particular these days when a single PC can easily beat 20 amiga render farm. Just trying to give some sound advice here.
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20 Amiga's ?
WOw...
what are the configurations ?
As for networking, you should have some sort of connection between all those Amiga's. Otherwise the networking software doesn't know automatically what to send to which amiga, if there is such software though.
Do you have them all networked ?
If not, than it will be hard to handle as you have so many!
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motorollin wrote:
Piru wrote:
Um, how about using a single PC to replace the farm of amigas?
Um, how about answering a perfectly good Amiga-related question instead of discouraging him? Maybe a PC would do it better, but if we all stopped using our Amigas for the things which other platforms do better then this site wouldn't be here.
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moto
To be Fair Moto... the Amiga was never that great for building Render farms... The Amiga served better as the set-up and control machine... leave the boring number crunching to cheap faceless whiteboxes!
Piru is quite right that the idea of using that many Amiga's now is a very wasteful idea;
1. Expensive, Amiga's are not cheap... networking them can get stupidly expensive too.
2. Dangerous, why stress a whole bunch of 15 year old machines which don't have much life span left for no reason.
3. Poluting, 20 Amiga's will burn 20 times more power than one modern PC.
4. Slow, 20 Amiga's will be much slower and probably output a lower resolution than a single modern PC.
5. Out of date software... 3D rendering software has come one leaps and bounds in the past 15 years.
If you have the money and the free sapce... then it would be an interesting peice of living archiology... but nothing more.
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To be Fair Moto... the Amiga was never that great for building Render farms... The Amiga served better as the set-up and control machine... leave the boring number crunching to cheap faceless whiteboxes!
Acctually in the days of amiga render farms the backend boxes were not faceless white boxes but usually pleasantly coloured SGI machines.
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Here is a tip.
Keep say 3 Amigas with all the best replacent parts and all the spares you think you will need.
Sell the rest on ebay...Take the proceeds from your sales and go to a site like www.geeks.com, Newegg.com or EBAY and for $3000-$4000 you can assemble a render farm consisting of 8-12 cheap Tawianese motherboard based PC systems.
Your render farm will be much more productive. Even an office pc, or a medica center pc can logon and become another machine in the render farm when not in use.
Babylon 5 was rendered on Amigas only for the first few seasons. They were all to happy to switch to cheap fast always on PC's the moment lightwave became available on PC.
One of the original BABYLON 5 era Amiga 2000's now sits in DAVESCHOOL, a Lighteave VFX school on Orlando florida. When any of the students complian how "slow" pc's are, they're told about the good old days waiting 5 days to render a logo animation that now takes 30 minutes with all fx turned on.
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trekiej wrote:
This question has probably been asked alot.
Is there a website dedicated to an Amiga Render Farm or has anyone here built one.
I have read on a site that you would have to have Queing software.
Networking for amiga is , I hear, expensive due to lack of hardware, except for using Elbox expansion boards.
Any info would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Ahh...now here is a topic that I have not seen discussed in a VERY long time. AMIGAs were used in render farm configurations back in the early / mid 90's when they were the best (ie most affordable) systems available. The first season of B5 (Babylon 5) used Amiga render farms to generate much of the exterior shots of the show (space, ships, station, etc..). The software of choice was of course NewTek Toaster / Flyer. I'm not aware of anyone still using the AMIGA in such a manner today so your project might be interesting to watch.
If you can find him, Tigger is a great person to ask about this topic. He has lots of experience in this area.
Regards,
Ltstanfo
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o.k firstly to answer your question.
-sceamernet is the software that runs the cue, it is built into lightwave... still is I think (don't use it much anymore)
secondly,
amiga's where NOT popular in renderfarms ever. Right around the time Babylon was being done lightwave was ported to PC just becasue amiga renderfarms where to expensive and slow.
Also Babylon 5 was NOT rendered on amigas for the first two seasons, it was only the pilot that used them.......you see the amiga was loosing ground even back then! Amiga where expencive NOT cheap!
lastly, for fun it may be cool to set up an amiga render fram, for productivity it would be retarded.
Also nothing form elbox is need or recomended, all you need an ethernet card like and x-surf which will cost you $120 IF you can find one (let alone 20x)
Still as a 3d guy, I would love to see/hear about your amiga render farm... I may even connect my 4000t and 4000d just for kicks but I need a second ethernet card.. and I tend to jam my systems full of zoro cards so I don't even know if I have enough space. LOL.
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Piru wrote:
Well, in my opinion single PC + lightwave would be
a) faster
b) cheaper
c) more energy efficient
d) more uptodate (better software, tools etc)
than render-farm of 20 Amigas.
If you have the skills to actually make money from your renders then the PC would be much more sensible investment.
@motorollin
Frankly, amiga is not very suitable for render farms, and in particular these days when a single PC can easily beat 20 amiga render farm. Just trying to give some sound advice here.
I agree that all of the above is true, and I do have one Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33gHz w/2gb RAM that could run LightWave for Windows, but I don't have the skills to make money from my rendered animations and until I learn to use my existing Amiga LightWave 5.0 better and see that I can possibly make some money with it (as it is just a hobby now) I don't think it is worthwhile for me to spend another $795 to purchase LightWave 9.2.
An Amiga render farm makes sense for me, as I have everything already, the 8 to 10 68040 or faster big box Amigas with ethernet cards, etc.
Another big reason to use an Amiga render farm is to partly justify the insanity of spending so much money over the last 15+ years collecting all this Amiga hardware and software. :lol: Amiga has always been about being able to do more with less resources. I want to see what I can create with my Amigas.
Also I want to teach, or allow teens and young adults interested in 3D design and video editing to use my many Amigas to learn how to get started in this field. Then they can move up to more powerful and modern systems if they want to continue their learning. That is one thing that can't be done by many users on one workstation.
I have a friend that still makes 90% of his income on one Amiga A2000 w/Toaster 4000 & Flyer system. He talks about moving to a newer different PC system, but the results he can produce on his Toaster/Flyer are still better than most other "so called" small time video editor/producers that he competes against.
But that is off topic, as he does not use LightWave much in his business, so fast render times are not critical.
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Amigas were used on Babylon 5, Seaquest, and ST:TNG-ST:Voyager around 94-95.
Actually a rendering computer in a custom case was built by Newtek to handle the rendering problem but sales were not great. It was more cost effective to run Lightwave on PC. It had an interesting case design, in the same style of the Play Trinity case but more of a Tower design.
By 1994-1995 with the death of Commodore Lightwave was unbuddled from the Amiga toaster and released to PC with Version 4 where it was being used for shows like Sapce Above and Beyond, Hypernauts and others.
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Piru wrote:
Um, how about using a single PC to replace the farm of amigas?
For many Amigans this would take the magic away. It is just to prove that such a task can still be done on our aging hardware. I dont see why not, as long as you have multiple amigas or/and the time/patience.
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The software of choice was of course NewTek Toaster / Flyer. I'm not aware of anyone still using the AMIGA in such a manner today so your project might be interesting to watch.
I dont know about render farms, but there are professionals who still use Amigas in this fashion. Take for example that french animation movie, that got actually very good reviews which was found to have been at least partially drawn using a old amiga.
Here is the link: imdb (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0286244/)
amiga sighted in the making of the movie (http://www.amiga.org/gallery/index.php?n=627=38)
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I googled Amgia cad a while back and found www.imaginefa.com .
They state that Arex can be used to automate tasks and I am leaning toward the queuing software as a possible choice.
I do not know what Alading4D uses if any.
I hope AOS4,Morphos,Aros will take up the slack.
AROS for X86 could be helpful.
I have been looking on the web lately for Render Farm info.
Blender and Povray are good open source choices. Interesting, there are also open source NLE's.
I have seen a Python port to Amiga but I do not know its status. I downloaded it the other day. I wish I had an accelerator. Sorry to be off topic. Python can be used to make games and works with blender. Blender for Amiga would provide the Blender game engine.
:-D
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Many years back I knew an insider in the Spielberg/Paramount vicinity and actually got to see the dark, warm room with a batch of Amigas purring away rendering frames for use for a show. I visited him several times and can't pin down which visit it was, but my guess is that it was for SeaQuest (a.k.a. "Star Trek Underwater" - if you ever watched it much you'd understand). Oh, and a trivia note - Darwin was animatronic!
As long as you understand that Lightwave is now on version 9.2, (versus what, 4.3 for Amiga), has been multi-core aware for a couple of years, and as they said above could probably exceed in speed (and certainly in quality due to new features) on a single multi-core Intel what that roomful of '040's could do....then it's perfectly valid to try to recreate such an environment.
I'm not sure that it's really worthwhile for a young person just learning 3D to have to suffer through the waits involved with using old hardware, though. Any job in which they can be meaningfully productive AT RENDERING is going to be using pretty up to date hardware and software. If all one is doing is nonlinear editing and an occasional logo, sure, one could still do it productively on a Toaster / Flyer. Move the task to hi-def, however, and it's just going to be too painful to do it old school. :-?
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Oh, and I don't really know what t-net is, but it's apparently related to Amigas and networking (might save you some looking for Ethernet cards). See info at
www.faqs.org/faqs/amiga/networking-faq/part2/ I don't guarantee that the links listed are still active. The Interworks site, referenced in the FAQ, seems to be in a state of suspended update. http://www.iworks.com/
If you don't need the speed of Ethernet, and for renders you may not, there ARE other ways of networking Amigas, such as PARNet, SERNet, and so on. I think there was even a SCSI net at some point but don't remember if they got if working. T-net may be one of these. Using Envoy, I think it was, we had a user group meeting with a line of Amigas connected by Ethernet, serial, parallel, and maybe a phone cord or two, it was pretty amazingly flexible. :-o
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I hate to say this but this is getting silly! Anybody that knows, amiga, Python and or blender would not try this! Why because it silly, thats why.
No accelerator? rendering? go get one, what are you waiting for!
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@pault1,
Amiga LightWave actually ended up with 5.0 (or was it 5.5), not 4.3, but I agree that is a long way from version 9.2 on a multi-core CPU, or several multi-core CPU's in the same machine.
As you said though, for most video editing with an occasional logo or custom effect that is only a few seconds long, an Amiga Toaster/Flyer system is still quite capable. And by having 8 to 10 68040 or faster Amigas networked together, it will ease the pain of waiting for rendered animations by a factor of 8 to 10!
That is my goal, not to duplicate what Pixar can do. Just a video editing suite that can put my local cable company to shame. You would not believe the crap that they broadcast up here in this little mountain community. To look at it, you would think it was produced by a bunch of mentally challenged people from 20 years ago. In fact I think my High School (which just happened to be the first in the country to have it's own complete video studio in 1968 by using donated old equipment from Hollywood) could have and did do a better job way back then.
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guru-666 wrote:
I hate to say this but this is getting silly! Anybody that knows, amiga, Python and or blender would not try this! Why because it silly, thats why.
No accelerator? rendering? go get one, what are you waiting for!
I'll agree with you there! If anyone else is thinking of rendering on any Amiga, they will be in for a very disappointing time (and a long wait) if they try to render more than one frame. It would be silly to buy Amiga equipment at this point in time to set up a render farm. If you don't already have all the Amigas and ethernet cards, as well as the Video Toaster and Screamer Net to distribute the rendering, DON'T BOTHER!
There are many other better solutions. Use what Amigas you DO HAVE to do something better suited to them, like play games if they are not accelerated.
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@amigadave
proving that talent matters more than hardware.. ifcourse...
however rending with 8 to 10 old amigas is a full time job and not time efficient. For fun and education, yes, for work, NO... the money and time it will take you are not worth the effort. (period)
I'm rendering right now... do so all day long, yes I have tired to render on the amiga recently as well as back in the day... embrace evolution, do the right thing.. do 3d work on a modern computer, you wont even NEED a farm for logos and such.
Some upcoming technology makes it possible to do real time raytracing on GPU's! Hardware renderin is going to be outdated!
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@amigadave.
LOL, I too have spent and insane amount of money on amiga gear! I hear you!
However, not to be to negative here, but I teach a 3d animaiton class over here in santa monica and I don't realy think using old toasters is a better way to start. They where great for us when they came out (there was nothing else!) but it's more helpful to just jump on final cut pro and learn the real deal. I would haate to be the guy to retrain the toaster trained kids. Also working on such old boxes is a turn off for many kids, the idea is to get them exited and educated on something they can buy or used elsewhere.
SOOOO, I have taken to producing and fantasy mexican soap opera with my amiga gear, it's quite fun!
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EDIT: this was written before your last reply
@guru-666,
Read my previous posts in this thread again. I am not spending another dime on any rendering software or hardware until I learn how to use what I already have. I may not be any good at it or I may not like the process of creating rendered images enough to pursue it any further.
Like you said, "for fun and education, yes, for work NO". If I had to do this for WORK, I would absolutely buy modern tools, both hardware and software.
Lucky for me, this Amiga stuff is just for fun and education (mostly self education) still.
P.S. what program(s) do you work with all day as a 3D artist?
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My post is to find out what is available for the Amiga.
I agree that it will not be profitable.
It falls back to hardware.
X86 and PPC and what the amiga developers do to make it happen.(Amiga,Genesi,etc)
MacOSX and Linux make the entry harder.
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I did, by inlarge I think we agree! think I know how it feels.
BTW is thomas serious about the user group? He has been talking about it for quite some time...... but I never heard of an actual date!
I'm over at a big facility (they don't want me to say) but we use Maya and code alot of stuff to fill the gaps... all linux
now go see "surfs up" , it's great!
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guru-666 wrote:
I did, by inlarge I think we agree! think I know how it feels.
BTW is thomas serious about the user group? He has been talking about it for quite some time...... but I never heard of an actual date!
I hope so, I was really looking forward to the User Group meetings. I have not heard of a rescheduled date yet, but will contact Thomas again to see what I can do to help make it happen.
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trekiej wrote:
My post is to find out what is available for the Amiga.
I agree that it will not be profitable.
It falls back to hardware.
X86 and PPC and what the amiga developers do to make it happen.(Amiga,Genesi,etc)
MacOSX and Linux make the entry harder.
Take everyone else's advice and do not travel down the Amiga path for 3D rendering. And absolutely do not think that Amiga Inc., Genesi, etc. are going to provide any useful improvements for Amiga 3D rendering any time this century!
You are greatly mistaken if you are depending on any of them to make a COST EFFECTIVE alternative for 3D rendering. I don't understand what you mean that MacOSX and Linux make the entry harder? That they are harder for you to learn to use???
Anyway, you have been advised and warned. Use the FORCE and choose a different path toward 3D enlightenment. :-D
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I would ask Todd he had a big render farm once.
:-D
Todd (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Rundgren)
video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7QEyaUVwTI)
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amigadave wrote:
I don't think it is worthwhile for me to spend another $795 to purchase LightWave 9.2.
There's currently LightWave 7.2 for Mac/PC on eBay - ends today, no bids starting at 50 GBP (about 95 USD)
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120129546178
M
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most of the big 3d packages offer some kind of studernt program where you get the software free. (with water mark or something) not sure if lightwave does this.....
@bloodmoney
man that video is bad.... I would say that hurt the toaster more than it helped... the music it self is awful!
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@AmigaDave
It is hard for the Amiga to enter this market when there are others already there.
Many have gone to Linux to make super computers that are much cheaper than mainframes.
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Could someone please start concentratin on the question and try to answer it ? Of course it makes no economical or logical sense, putting 50 horses before a cart wouldn`t too but that would also be something I`liek to see. Just to see that and how it does work.
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Finally some common sense again.
Although I haven't got 20 Amigas I do render some animations on four different machines with 060. Three of these machines are A1200 and one machine is A4000. You only need to buy one network card (PCMCIA) you can swap between all A1200's. The A4000 has a network card too so I only need 2. Divide all the frames between all machines and use lha and copy to get all files on one machine. From there you can create the animation after you've collected all frames. (Some of my frames take 1 hour so it makes sense to use more machines).
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If I used PC's for rendering and the Amiga for modeling, can the Amiga handle complex models?
Memory and other hardware limitations being considered
Self edited:
I believe that Goldeneye was done with Amigas with Raptor boxes for rendering. DEC Alpha.
Morphos had a node client for Efika. Efika is probably slow in todays standards.
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First there was a toaster and it switched video like nothing before it, and then Tim gathered software from his friends Allen and Stuart and thus Lightwave was born.
I typed this in once already and the org ate it, so this version may be a little shorter. As of version 3.5 of Lightwave (actually it started out in 3.2, but that was a fairly small distribution) an option called Screamernet (after the 4 MIP processor product called the Screamer that it originally talked to) was added to product. It allowed one computer to control the rendering of at first dozens and eventually 1000 and now basically infinite nodes. To do this they need to talk on a network, though if you dont have a network, you can cheat by having each process run the exact same lightwave project and skip frames so each computer is doing different frames. Thats how we did it before lightwave 3.5. Someone was talking about the cost of lightwave being one of the reasons they are running it on there Amiga. I would like to point out that any version of lightwave to Intel/Mac Lightwave 9.2 is $395, so its $400 cheaper then what was commented on here. In addition there are educational discounts and educational bundles (5 or more licenses) that are very nicely priced. As for the speed comparison, as one of the guys who wrote the infamous VTU article, I'd like to point out that when Intel lightwave came out at version 4.0, I bought a Pentium 100Mhz to run it on (that was a very fast computer then) and it ran the standard test suite 10X faster then my 25Mhz 68040 A4000. In this day and age, writing to the disk takes longer then render time on those scenes, if I send them to be fast raid, its basically realtime, now I tend now to do high def and lots of AA and add lots of refraction etc which adds to the time, but if I run the default scene as it came with 4.0, it will run them 400-500X faster then the P100 on a modern PC, and if throw a big render machine at it, its even worse. But I'm not trying to discourage you, after all, I'm the one who got lightwave to run on his PDA under UAE, but thats another story.
-Tig
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Uh... yeah you could learn on the Amiga if you want to wait overnight for a single frame to render.
I've been using lightwave on my 3.2ghz PC and I can render a single frame in about oh... 25 seconds.
(http://retroboxes.myvnc.com/animation/vase1.jpg)
Truth is I spent years trying to learn 3d on my Amiga 1200. I learned in a week what I had been trying to learn for years on my Amiga simply because the machine was fast enough for me to modify the scene and re-render until it looked good.
I was using imagine for the Amiga though... not lightwave.
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bloodmoney wrote:
I would ask Todd he had a big render farm once.
:-D
Todd (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Rundgren)
video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7QEyaUVwTI)
It should be pointed out that Rundgren stated that he unequivocally hated the Amiga; he used the ToasterController for the Mac (his preferred platform) to handle the rendering on the Amigas. And as for "render farm" - he was swapping harddrives around. Totally done via sneakernet.
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totally done with out regard for athetics as well! Horable piece.
The amiga had a rough interface and low resolution compared to the mac back in the day... but it was still a more powerful machine.
I was in collage back then and remeber being able to produce way better (and more animation) that the guys that would only touch a mac with infini-D. LOL However I resent the flickering sceen ( i was too poor to get a FF) and the hored interface that image came up with.... glad that is over.
Did like photoshop the moment I saw it! I also perfered the AVID to the toaster back then.
@vic20owner
nicely done man!
Imagine was powerful but HARD to learn!
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I wish I had lightwave for my Amiga...I'd like to re-render that vase on the Amiga and see what I end up with and how long it takes. It would be an interesting experiment.
I bought an A3000 awhile back which had lightwave installed on the harddrive... but I sold it not long after and with it went lightwave.
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If I hear correctly, emulated Amiga is faster than real Amiga.
No one wants to buy an expensive pc to run emulated Amiga.
Aladin4D runs under emulation.
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@vic20owner
send me the files, not sure what version you did it in but Ihave v5 for the amiga and this sounds just useless enough to have my attention.
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guru-666 wrote:
@vic20owner
send me the files, not sure what version you did it in but Ihave v5 for the amiga and this sounds just useless enough to have my attention.
:horse: :lol:
What Amiga will you run it on? 68030/25mHz, 68040/40mHz, 68060/50mHz?
I can just imagine your response to the people working on the Open Toaster/Flyer website for wasting their time too.
Call me crazy, but I for one would like the Amiga version of LightWave to recognize and use my 233mHz 604e PPC. (Probably no one working on that anyway right now) :-D
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For whomever asked somewhere near the beginning of this thread, here is a list of my Amiga computers:
1 - A4000T w/CyberStormPPC @233mHz & 060 @50mHz
2 - A4000D in 3rd party Towers, 1 w/CyberStormPPC @233mHz & 060 @50mHz
1 - A4000D in disrepair
2 - A1200 1 w/68060@50mHz both original desktop cases
1 - A3000T
3 - A3000D
2 - A2000 1 w/68060@50mHz & 150mb RAM
2 - A600
2 - A500 1 w/A530 Turbo GVP
2 - A1000
2 - CD32 1 New in Box never used
1 - CDTV
I have 5 full Video Toaster/Flyer setups, including several hard drive towers full of 4GB to 36GB drives, 2 VLAB Motion setups and 2 GVP IV24's plus about 6 or 7 DCTV's for my Amiga video and animation addiction.
Man am I one sick puppy!
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LOL awsome!
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Nice collection!
...must be pretty crowded round your place?
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I sense a picture is comming up from that room!
:)
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we need a picture amigadave!
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HellCoder wrote:
I sense a picture is comming up from that room!
:)
You sure it's all in one room?
Hans
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I hope that DiscreetFX will help the future of the Amiga render farm with the anouncement of Aladdin4d for Aros/etc.