Render farming, is it possible?

[Anonymous]

Strait to the point. Is render farming possible in AC?

In other words, can I process parts of a rendering job on multiple PCs then compile a completed image?

I guess a counterpart question to this would be, is it possible to render in the background or use an alternate PC to handle renders?

To me, it seems that all work has to stop as soon as you want to render (unless you dare run another instance and push NarchiCAD to its limit and then it decides to take a nap)

[TomWaltz]

Nope.

There are a few workarounds to make multiple machines work on an animation, but the actual "render farm" kind of parallel processing like you get from a real animation software is not possible.

[Dwight]

Two simultaneous copies of ArchiCAD (New Product Idea: "NarchiCAD" - software that puts you to sleep while you design, not at all unusual with the strip mall) will work, but have a mult-processor machine. The rendering will be slow. No splitting renderings with Litewurx.

You really need another license on a second machine - a teamwork solution....

But listen - if you are producing enough renderings to be concerned, perhaps you should consider Artlantis - quick and background capable (still performs best on another machine), or Cinema 4D and Render King (no better name) a commercial render farm.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the replies.

I'm not cranking out a million renders here but when the poly count gets high (too many trees) the wait can get to be a bit much. I'm just geeky enough to wonder.

Thanks again.

[Dwight]

There's the flaw:

Render farms don't speed up rendering, they distribute animation frames to speed assembly.

Cinema 4D, for instance, only does single frames even if distributed in a render farm.

While it takes advantage of multi-processor machines, individual frames aren't shared between machines.

You might remember the old days with Archicad's infernal rendering engine that a rendered image could be assigned to several machines according to line number, or stopped each morning at a specific line number for a multi-day rendering. The resulting strips would be assembled in photoshop. In the old days, when a decent rendering took a week of night shifts, this is how you used your machine in the daytime.

Those days are gone. Now a machine performs a global illumination, radiosity or ray-traced "solution" like a crystal, and renders the scene from the solution. One frame at a time.