Render Farm - Maximum Tasks to Farm Out?

I had a question about the maximum tasks to farm out setting. If I have two quad core machine farmed out, what should my setting be? Inline with that question, slices do what for the rendering? It seems when I render the it makes it to the final slice, then stops. I want my rendering to keep rendering and not stop, so I can get a complete high quality rendering. Could you please advise me on how to keep the farmed rendering going.

Also, I had a question about the farming process in general.

Thanks,

Nick

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on March 31, 2011 at 2:11pm

With the rendering farm, you have to speciify the number of passes, since each farm machine and each slice needs to use the same number of passes. Each slice will stop after this number of passes is completed.

We recommend that you set the number of slices to 2 1/2 times the number of Farm Machines available. That way if one machine is faster than the others it will be able to process an extra slice. If you set thenumber of slices to high, then too much time is wasted loading slices, starting the rendering, and processing the slices. (A "slice" determines how many horizontal lines of the rendering are processed at a time be each farm machine.

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Permalink Reply by N. Norman on March 31, 2011 at 2:15pm

Farm Machines = Number of cores

Farm Machines = Number of actual computers in the farm

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Permalink Reply by Rich Hart on March 31, 2011 at 2:15pm

It's supposed to be the number of seconds passed since the Timer was started, when the Farm job was started. It's just there so we can see how long it's been running.

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on March 31, 2011 at 2:22pm

Farm Machines = Number of actual computers running the farm.

Each Farm Machine will use all of its cores on its slice(s) - one slice at a time.

N. Norman said:

Farm Machines = Number of cores

or

Farm Machines = Number of actual computers in the farm

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Permalink Reply by N. Norman on March 31, 2011 at 2:31pm

So, a slice is the number of horizontal line being rendered per machine during the rendering process.Right?

That being said, does the ray tracer rendering processes work with the slice due to the way it renders the whole image at once.

The other rendering processes seems to rendering line per line, which would make since for the terminology of a slice.

Also, if you want 400 passes, where can you see what pass it is on?

Al Hart said:

With the rendering farm, you have to speciify the number of passes, since each farm machine and each slice needs to use the same number of passes. Each slice will stop after this number of passes is completed.

We recommend that you set the number of slices to 2 1/2 times the number of Farm Machines available. That way if one machine is faster than the others it will be able to process an extra slice. If you set thenumber of slices to high, then too much time is wasted loading slices, starting the rendering, and processing the slices. (A "slice" determines how many horizontal lines of the rendering are processed at a time be each farm machine.

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Permalink Reply by N. Norman on March 31, 2011 at 2:40pm

This is about as good as my rendering gets when farmed out. And it only renders for only a few minutes. Super grainy. Does this have to do with the rendering farm software being in the trial period?

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on March 31, 2011 at 2:51pm

Passes for Render Farm

You need to set the number of passes desired on the Render SetUp tab of the Setup Wizard.

Before using the rendering farm at all, you should render a smaller version of the image (say 600 pixels wide) to determine how many passes you want. For example, you could render the drawing above for 200 passes (you probably only rendered it for the default number of passes - 20 or 40), then you could increase the size of the rendered image, increase the number of passes, and start a Render Farm version.

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on March 31, 2011 at 2:57pm

So, a slice is the number of horizontal line being rendered per machine during the rendering process.Right?

That being said, does the ray tracer rendering processes work with the slice due to the way it renders the whole image at once.

The other rendering processes seems to rendering line per line, which would make since for the terminology of a slice.

Also, if you want 400 passes, where can you see what pass it is on?

A slice determines the number of horizontal lines per slice. If you ask for 10 slices, and have 975 horizontal lines, then 97 or 98 lines will be assigned to each slice.

Each Farm task has to read and prepare the entire model/scene, since the top slice may reflect geometry which is not visible, or only visible in other slices. This is less effecient, and will take more time, than just rendering the whole scene at once, so a Render Farm make the most sense if:

1. You have 1 or more very fast computers on the network and want to let users use these machines (which are much faster than their own machines)

2. You have 2 or more (better if 3, or 4, or more) fast computers you want to use to speed up a very large rendering job by dividing it up.

When we first got the Render Farm we installed in to about 12 computers which were nor particularly fast, and told it do divide the job into 32 slices. This took much longer than if we had just let the fastest of the 12 computers do the same thing by itself.

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Permalink Reply by Olyz on January 29, 2014 at 3:53am

Hi Al,

I notice that only one core of 4 is being used on my second machine? I have 4 cores set in the irender software. Is there a way of configuring the second machine?

Thanks

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Permalink Reply by Olyz on January 29, 2014 at 4:20am

I hope it was ok to jump in on this thread, and did so because you mention each farm machine will use all of its cores on its slice, one at a time.

I have just noticed that my second farm machine has now stopped rendering altogether (going by CPU usage), the only thing I have done is change one of the light parameters, which can normally be done while rendering but in the case of farming, has it disrupted it?

Hope you can help.