Amiga Render Farm

[Crom00]

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.

[Crom00]

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.