Render Farm Slices

It turns out that the Render Farm divides up tasks based on the number of cores and processors on each farm machine. For instance if you have 4 farm machines each with 4 cores, then you want to make sure you have at least 16 tasks to keep them busy.

We are changing the Render Farm Settings to specify the number of pixel rows of each slice, rather than the number of tasks, and recommending a default of 32.

This will be in the next release of IRender nXt.

(In the meantime set the number of tasks to about twice the number of cores total on all your farm machines, or just set it to 32)

Submitting a Render Farm Job

The Render Farm Settings Wizard used to define settings for the Render Farm and to start rendering a model with the Farm.

Render Farm Job Name

• Name the job or accept the default. The date and time is automatically pre-pended to the name you choose. A sub-folder for the job is created in the Render Farm shared folder. An Output folder is also created in the new job folder.

Render Image Size

• This is the size which will be used for the Render Farm rendering.

Stop rendering after

• You must specify how many passes to use before stopping the rendering.
• There is corresponding setting for a time limit.

Rows per farm slice (default 32)

• Determines how many rendering rows will be assigned to each farm task.

The total number of tasks should be at least twice the number of cores on all of your machines to ensure maximum usage of all machines.

The default value of 32 rows per slice will work well unless you find you are not using enough of the cores on your machines.

Use Auto Image

The .nXtImage and .JPG (or .PNG) file will automatically be created when the task is complete.