How to set up render farm

Can you point me to documentation and/or downloads for setting up the "Render Farm" component? I seem to be overlooking it.

My goal is to set up a second PC to do all the rendering.

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on October 5, 2011 at 9:36am

A render farm works best with 2 (preferably 4 to 8 or more) additional PC's sharing the rendering task.

See the inscructions here:

http://www.renderplus.com/wk/Render_Farm_w.htm

If you want to use a second PC for rendering, you are better off running the batch renderer on the second machine, rather than setting up a "1 PC Render Farm"

You will set up your Batch Rendering options to save the rendering information on a drive - either a drive on the machine which will be rendering - or a drive on your PC which is shared by the other machine.

You will then save the Batch Rendering information, and then go to the other machine to start the rendering.

More information on Batch Rendering is stored here:

http://www.renderplus.com/wk/Batch_Rendering_w.htm

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Do any other users have any experience or advice on doing this?

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Permalink Reply by Kent on October 6, 2011 at 7:49am

Thanks for the info.

I am not seeing the farm icon in my toolbar. It is ticked in the toolbar config area and I have the farm software installed. What else do I need to do?

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on October 6, 2011 at 7:56am

Have you installed the Render Farm on the machine where you are running SketchUp.

Even if the machine running SketchUp is not gong to be used as an active farm, the farm needs to be installed.

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Permalink Reply by Kent on October 6, 2011 at 8:06am

Yes, and running the farm monitor on the Sketchup machine shows both machines.

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on October 6, 2011 at 8:21am

I may need to add some debugs to figure out why the icon is not appearing.

After starting IRender nXt, can you open the SketchUp Ruby Console, and type in:

$irnxt.nxtdll_call_is_farm_installed

tap enter, and let me know if it returns true or false?

(It is easiest to copy the text from here and paste it into the Ruby console)

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on October 6, 2011 at 8:24am

Also, try this command form the ruby console:

$irnxt.get_global_String("sir_render_farm_folder")

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Permalink Reply by Kent on October 6, 2011 at 8:30am

$irnxt.nxtdll_call_is_farm_installed
false

$irnxt.get_global_String("sir_render_farm_folder")
Note: The Render Farm has not been installed.

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Permalink Reply by Kent on October 6, 2011 at 8:36am

the farm software I installed was: nXtFarm64_0276

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on October 6, 2011 at 8:46am

That may be a clue. The latest version may be storing its installation information in a new place.

Let us install it here and see if we can get it to work.

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on October 6, 2011 at 5:40pm

While we are testing the new Render Farm version, could you uninstall it and install the older version (239) instead. That is the one we have tested in the past.:

Here are the download links for version 239:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/mcneel/accurender/4.0/wip/en/nXtFarm_0239.exe

http://s3.amazonaws.com/mcneel/accurender/4.0/wip/en/nXtFarm64_0239...

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on October 6, 2011 at 6:13pm

After installing the 276 version, I see that it does put its install information in the same place in the registry.

If you are comfortable with the registry, could you look in this same place in Current_User to see if the path is set properly:

I put the 276 in the path name during instllation just to make sure that I was looking at the new version. This is stored in Current_User rather than Local_Machine, so it could be we can't find it if you installed the render farm as a different user, or if the installation did not have permission to write to the registry.