Rendering Slaves?

[Ben624]

Any plans to give vectorworks the ability to slave other computers on a network for rendering tasks?

[grant_PD]

now that would be great

[azizg]

I'd say that was a brilliant idea!!

[Petri]

Why do I think that a separate rendering program, perhaps with the mentioned facility, would be more appropriate for those people & situations where this could really make a difference?

[Kevin]

Apple's Xgrid, might serve this purpose. Is anyone familiar with this?

http://developer.apple.com/hardwaredrivers/hpc/xgrid_intro.html

[G_Hannigan]

The downside of having Vectorworks & Renderworks so tightly linked is that you cannot use VW while rendering. This is one reason why so many of us use a separate program for rendering. I can then use VW while the rendering goes on in the background.

[MKingsley]

George,

Could you give me a brief description as to the differences between the two rendering programs you show in your signature? Such as when you would use one over the other? I agree that having to wait for Renderworks to finish its stuff before I can get back to VW is a drag.

[G_Hannigan]

Artlantis and Cinema4D (currently waiting for new C4D - 12.5 Plugin) use Export Plugins to send a VW file to them for rendering. This creates a link to original VW file so that subsequent changes to geometry can be updated in the renderer without having to start from scratch.

Artlantis 4.5 has been replaced by Artlantis R and Artlantis Studio and is no longer available. Haven't tried the new ones yet.

Artlantis is easier to learn - it's for rendering only. C4D has modeling, animation and rendering functions as well.

Samples:

C4D: http://www.home.earthlink.net/imagelib/s...mp;target=_self

Artlantis: http://www.home.earthlink.net/imagelib/s...mp;target=_self

http://www.home.earthlink.net/~ghann1/index.html

George

[MKingsley]

Thanks George

[G_Hannigan]

You're welcome.

[islandmon]

The Future is NOW:

What's New, GPU?

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/computers/0,72090-0.html?tw=wn_index_1

Supercomputing's Next Revolution

? The future of high-performance computing lies in graphics chips developed for the consumer video game market. By Paul Tulloch.? Nov 9, 2006 | 2:00 AM

How fast?

This is the subject of quite a bit of speculation. ATI provided the following "hockey stick" chart comparing GPU and CPU performance, although this is subject to important caveats described below:

The graph compares the latest x1900 series of GPU manufactured by AMD/ATI to the latest dual-core AMD Opteron CPU processors produced by the same company. The performance measures they provided are measured in gigaflops, or billions of calculations per second.

As you can see, the current GPUs have rocketed ahead of the performance of CPUs on pure, raw processing power. And it would seem from the above graph one would expect at least a 4 to 5 times increase in speed of GPUs over CPUs. However, rumors are circulating that peg the latest dual ATI x1900 GPUs running in cross fire mode up near the one teraflops range, so it would be a safe bet that a four to five times speed increase shown above should be viewed as a conservative estimate.

[G_Hannigan]

While speed increases are always welcomed, the problem is that VW is not available during a RW procedure. If the prediction you quote comes to pass, a scene that currently takes 4 hours to render, will still block VW access for an hour.