Using remote workstations

[chasingmagiclight]

Thought I would try the demo before purchasing and ran into some issues.

I have a hackintosh main workstation running Blender and GeForce8800, and a render machine running RHEL 5.6 and GTX560. I was thinking my workflow would be export OBJs from Blender on the Mac to a shared folder, pick those OBJs up and render them on Linux. However, when I connect to the Linux box using VNC nothing works, Octane starts but never renders anything (no errors however). If I try over X I get an error "Failed to initialize OpenGL Extensions"

Is what I'm doing out of the ordinary? Is there a better workflow that would allow me to run on my primary workstation and offload renders to another machine?

Cheers!

[radiance]

OpenGL display does not work over a network via the X11 protocol if the Xgl extension is not supported on the server display (eg on your mac).
You need to use an X11 server software that support Xgl for remote OpenGL viewing.

Octane uses opengl for it's render viewport display so that's the reason you need it, and some other remote desktop protocols like vnc don't always support it.

Best bet is to see if you can get xgl support enabled on your mac X server.
The box should still render though, and save the images to disk.

Radiance

[chasingmagiclight]

OK I got something working so far. Here's a quick outline of the steps if anyone else is interested:

1. Installed TurboVNC and VirtualGL on CentOS 5.6 http://www.virtualgl.org/Main/HomePage
2. Installed TurboVNC on OSX
3. Connect from Mac to Linux using TurboVNC as normal
4. Quick test using glxgears "vglrun glxgears" should run without warning about missing GLX
5. Finally run Octane using "vglrun octane_demo"

So far seems pretty responsive, we'll see about stability.

[mib2berlin]

Hi, i have tested remote control to octane with teamviewer over internet connection.
Depends of your connection performance it is usable to control or start a render process.
I tested with a 16/1 and 30/2 Mbit connection.

Cheers, mib.