Cheap Render Farms?

[pierre]

BTW render farms are still used ( I also saw your post in yahoo) I work in a large animation studio and we have 1000's of nodes.  A few years back at onther studio we still used lightwave(NOT AMIGA) to render, and heck yeah we had a farm.  We wrote our own software but that does not change much.  Screamernet has been around for a while (I can't belive how long....don't want to know makes me feel old).  Nowadays we don't use DEC alphas anymore.(they are now slow)  You could/should use pc's as a renderfarm for lightwave (otherwise linux, but you can't render lightwave on linux....) Check out the spider render cue software.  If you intro history you CAN connect your a1200 and 4000 but it will not be BLAZING fast!  It's not realy A good idea to go with and oldschool render farm.  why?
1, slow machins suck as much power as fast ones
2, slow and old machines take up more space than new ones
3, to have the same power as 3 new ones you would need 20 old ones, and unless you live in a huge dust free env. with tons of power you are going to reach you maximum power load FAST.  This is actualy why INTEL stock has gone back up with there new chips, they use less power!  Not a huge deal if you have one CPU but considerable if you have 50 units.  Now if all you want to do is connect the a1200 and the a4000 sounds like a nice project, if you realy want render power, get some intel or amd boxes and go crazy!

[pierre]

That a great dream, I do the same thing.  Make stuff with my old amigas becasue I enjoy working with them... HOWEVER it not the same as ceramics.  With computer animation the tools sucked 15 years ago, and not in a good way.  Things have evolved. I can now do they type of work I was dreaming of back then.  Ceramics has been the same sice hte invented that spinning table... I want people to understand that while you can do this as a hobby, don't expect if to complare with current technology!  Also it's not cheap, AMIGAS are VERY expensive!  Also like I mentioned above there are practical consideration, like space and power consumption!  Another thing is that it actualy A LOT OF work to maintain an AMIGA render farm, parts will fail you will need to fix things, software will malfunction, MORE SO THAN ON OTHER PLATFORMS.  The older the gear the more work you will have to do, it's not trivilal, I have experience with amiga render farms and as an AMIGA fan I can honestly tell you I can glad we have better gear now!!

[pierre]

you can just render even and odds.... but a real render farm does way more than that.  

1,
you can use many machines to render just one (realy heavy)   frame. (with some software)

2,
you can set up and manage a whole bunch of different scenes at the same time, some lightwave, some renderman some imageFX some shake.....for nice 24/7 render action.

3,
manage resources in a production enviroment.

4,
You can keep all your textures in one place and share them,


things you want to avoid....
render the same scene on different patforms.  if you use motorola render the whole scene on that, if you have intel render the whole scene on that, ALPHA ...  why? becaue the random number generation is different on various chips for procedial textures  (Like marbel) will look differnt causing
wired flicker.... just thought you wanted to know...

[pierre]

hey man, maybe it's a bug, just telling you what I saw and what I was told it was.... I think you are right on modern hardware/software has this fixed, ppl where talking about Amiga renderfarms I know that this issue was real in those days, there was lots of odd stuff back then. Not total nonsense unless you wrote lightwave and can tell my why the frames looked differnt..