Render Farms?
 

I'll be working on a project that takes a long time to render on my poor old computer (About a half hour per frame, a couple hours w/ radiosity). I was wondering where I could find a render farm or someone willing to render these scenes in a relatively short amount of time and at little cost. If I can't find anything, I'll spend the whole project time (a month) rendering one movie!

Does anyone know where and for how much I can get a LW site license for my school?

Thanks

I've never used a render farm but I have heard that this one is a good one:

http://www.respower.com/

Hope it helps.

You can get a Student version of LW here for like 395$ last time I checked but you have to get your school to send them a letter or something so they can verify your in school.

http://www.sharbor.com/

Wow Kvaalen, I had no idea you could do that stuff over the net...repower looks like it could come in handy! Our local animation studio has been really slow this past year and they hooked up18 of the dual processors systems for a lightwave project... heard it worked like a charm!... So CheesEv, that may be another route you could look at.

I'm using the student version of Lightwave right now, actually. What I'm looking for is the sort of LW package that would allow my school to install it on as many comps as it needs.

Thanks for the link Kvaalen, but their services are still out of my (price range). That's why I was hoping to get my school to pick up the tab for many copies of LW. Then I'd be able to render with many of my school's faster comps.

You do realise that with screamernet, you only need one copy of LW? You can then render on as many slave CPUs as you need...

I spoke to my buddy who used the animation studio for redering... he said that screamer net gave him a bit of trouble when setting it up but told me to check out this site... www.destinyimages.com/files/lightnet.html he said it was eisier to set up and worked better than a regular screamernet... check it out, it's free :)

Doh. Forgot about Lightnet.

Yep. It's a controller for screamernet (and a damn fine one at that). I've used it in the past, and it still did give me a little trouble in places (but I believe that it's been through several updates since).

It still wouldn't hurt to try setting up a plain vanilla screamernet system though - just to get a feel for it and it's problems (since Lightnet still depends on it to get the rendering done).

Hey, thanks Mark and quaoar! I wish I had thought of using Screamernet. It looks like the very solution I was looking for.

Now all I need to do is convince my school's tech department to let me monopolize a dozen computers or so!

A side question: Since Screamernet wont output animations, where can I get some cheap software to bind the frames together? I remeber that it was possible with the early versions of QuickTime (maybe Pro'll do it).

Thanks again!

You can do it with Lightwave.

Screamer/Lightnet will output a series of numbered frames. From these, create a new scene in Layout. Open the image editor and load in the first of your numbered frames. Set the image type to 'Image sequence'

Now, in the compositing tab, set the background to the loaded image sequence.

No need to worry about lighting.

In render options, set the last frame to be the last frame of the sequence and set your output file. Hit F10 to render.

Since LW is only rendering background stills, it should fly through the sequence.

(in my experience, rendering a sequence out like this through LW is almost four times faster than doing the same thing through Premiere 6.1)...

You can also use a freeware (for non commercial use) program that I used to use with Terragen when I made animations, called "Fast Movie Processor" you can get it here as well as many other sites:

http://lecomtejm.online.fr/terragen/download_en.html

The only thing I don't like about it is that it doesn't support TIF files, but other than that, it's great.

If you want an easier solution than using lightnet, check out Amleto. http://www.rayserver.com

Just install the client on the render machine and it will automatically install the required lwsn files on the machine for you. No mapping of network drives needed either.

Good News
 

The media center staff have agreed to let me use their computers. I'll be setting up ScreamerNet (maybe I'll graduate to those other packages after I get through with Scream).

They say that I can use a couple computers during the day and an entire lab at night! That's about twenty computers! All of them faster than my home comp! Looks like I'll be radiositerizing after all ;).

That's great news! Do we get a look when it's rendered?

Sure! The main part of the project starts next month and will take a few weeks. The project will be to model my school's campus (as much as I can finish in such short time). I've only made a practice scene so far. It has grass, rocks, trees, a path, and ... a bench (gasp!), but it only looks half-realistic. I'll make sure to post WIPs throughout the project to get all of the comments/professional views that I can.

It'll be great!