ArchiCAD and Net/Distributed Rendering

[Anonymous]

Having just spent a week generating a detailed flythrough of a project, I am wondering about how others handle such a task.

I choose to break up a rather complex VR path into 10 smaller ones and then render each separately on 5 available computers. The computers are not typically available and it was a rare opportunity for me to try this idea... It was better than doing it on one computer, but it still took ages.

Beyond the pros and cons of VRs over nicely rendered stills, what are people's experiences with render farms, net rendering, distributed rendering, etc.? Does ArchiCAD work with any of the offerings out there? For instance, the Cinema4D net rendering solution? Does anyone have experience with such things and using them with an ArchiCAD model?

Any insight would be great!

[Dwight]

Distributed processing? Fuggedaboudit!


Cinema 4D render distribution/farm/ranch works well for alternate frames of an animation but not singles.

ArchiCAD's camera controls are so rudimentary it is worthwhile to invest in more appropriate software for involved work like yours.

[Anonymous]

Dwight is right. Translate the model to Cinema, elaborate it with lights, textures, entourage. Render, move it to iMovie and generate DVD.

Think about the typical NTSC frame 640 x 480 which might render in Cinema at 2 minutes. A 2 minute walk by shooting miight take a single machine ( 30 fps smooth) about 3,600 individual frames. That would take this example 120 hours. Cut the frame rate in half (still somewhat acceptable) and the render time drops to just 60 hours or 2.5 days.

RenderKing.com offers up to 50 cpu's, which would drop the time to render for this job to approximately 1.2 hours to complete.

[TomWaltz]

Terry wrote:
Having just spent a week generating a detailed flythrough of a project, I am wondering about how others handle such a task.

I choose to break up a rather complex VR path into 10 smaller ones and then render each separately on 5 available computers. The computers are not typically available and it was a rare opportunity for me to try this idea... It was better than doing it on one computer, but it still took ages.

Beyond the pros and cons of VRs over nicely rendered stills, what are people's experiences with render farms, net rendering, distributed rendering, etc.? Does ArchiCAD work with any of the offerings out there? For instance, the Cinema4D net rendering solution? Does anyone have experience with such things and using them with an ArchiCAD model?

Any insight would be great!

I'm a big proponent of rendering paths as individual JPG frames.

With that being the case, you can open Archicad on as many machines as you want and render certain frames. ALWAYS open the BPN for rendering. That way if you need to make a change, you can open the PLN off the network and make a change that applies for subsequent renderings.

If you have a 2000 frame path and 5 machines, you could set one for 1-400, one 401-800, and so on. That works of you plan to just leave the machines alone and pick up the frames a while later.

If you want to babysit and get them done faster, break them down so each machine is doing 50 frames or so, then as one machine finishes, start the next 50 frames. Since some machines will bog down on more complex sections, you spread the work around a little. It takes a notebook and a good night's sleep beforehand, but it will work.

I did this second method with 12 machines once. I barely sat down for three hours, but had 1500 frames at 1280x1024.

The other benefit of rendering to JPG stills is that if you see something wrong, you can change it and re-render only the frames affected, not the whole thing. This has saved my ass many times over.

All that said, a real net-rendering engine like Cinema 4D is WAY better.