Blenders {optional} Network Render Add-On is a bit clumsy…
You see it has 3 separate types of machine, which are Client, Master and Slave
Only the Slaves render
The Master only sends jobs to the slaves
And the Client controls the master (that's the one you type/click at to get the others to render a .blend file)
Gaze into the middle distance…
Lets see FIVE computers; 3 desktop m/c (all AMD, 2x Athlon and a Llano) a Samsung laptop with a dual-core Pentium thing, and another Dell laptop with a Celeron.
The llano runs Win 7 64bit, Samsung win 7 32, oldest Athlon 3000 runs XP, the other Athlon (5000?) runs Linux Mint and then comes the Dell…
The Dell came with Vista Home Basic, which it now runs off an SSD and I put the max 4GB RAM in it but by golly you would think a Celeron was bad enough but then they fit it out with Intel integrated graphics! Anyway in Vista it cannot run Blender, but it has too much stuff to change it over to a linux.
Oh look an 8GB USB stick, great slowly go thru Distrowatch’s list looking for Live style linux’s. So far of the 8 I managed to get working using Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.3.1 (from pendrivelinux) UnbutuStudio is looking the winner.
- 5 (FIVE) computers, three types of machine needed:
- 1xMaster
- 1x Client
- The rest slaves, who do all the real work
I need a Montage
Well the Dell became the Master and the the old XP and Samsung became slaves of about the same level of performance
The AMD (5000?) Linux Mint was also a slave
So my main machine Win 7 64 Lano had to be a client (it is where all my Blender stuff is done). But you can also start another instance of Blender and make that a slave on the same machine. So from 5 machines I got 4 slaves, a master and a client!
Triumph of the Will
And I got about a doubling of performance with the render time of a test animation (in this case of a shark swimming) of 300 HD frames from 10 minutes to 5 minutes (about 13 seconds of footage)
