network rendering

[havensole]

I was thinking of making a small app, probably in java for cross platform capability, to make rendering an animation file over a network viable. Idea is not to distribute a single frame over the network, and I don't think that'd work as this is GPU based, but single frames sent to each system. I think I remember you saying in another thread that there will be a command line version coming, so I was wondering if this would be in the v1 release or not. Once I get it working I can send it you guys to toy with. I've written a small app like this for blender (using the command line interface), but the networking aspect has kind of been a pain. It works, but is kind of slow right now. I would imagine porting it over to use the Octane CLI would be fairly straight forward.

[radiance]

What about using an existing render queue ?
like the OSS drqueue ?

Radiance

[havensole]

I thought about Dr.Queue, but I have always had problems getting it working properly, mainly due to the fact I'm using blender properly I'm sure. It is kind of a pain to setup in my opinion. All the scripting and such. The one I designed for blender is really light and just needs a simple user configuration of setting up a shared storage space, where the file and renders are stored, and entering some configuration information (frames to render, scripts it should run, file format to save to, etc.). It really is a basic render farm kind of app. I am working with one of my co-workers to get some kind of management system working, like a web interface to see the render's progress and cancel jobs and such, but I am not sure when that might be implemented so I didn't list it initially. I am interested to see what kind of options the Octane CLI has as that will affect the possibilities of the app I am working on. This app is also Java (at its current incarnation) so designing it for different operating systems is pretty straight forward. I've been mainly thinking of simplicity in setup, ease of use, and light footprint on the system. I am open to ideas everyone might have.