Indigo Network Rendering onto a Server - HELP

JackDamnGood

Hi all,

I work at a design company, and we are currently looking for a way to optimize and improve our rendering capabilities without it effecting the rest of the networks performance, currently when rendering in Indigo, it slows down the server, which in turn slows down the entire company network, I have started looking into dedicated servers PURELY for rendering, but before I started looking, I thought it would be best to ask here for your recommendations, and any requirements there may be.

If you need me to provide any further details I am more than happy to do so.

Kind Regards,
Jack

EDIT: Is there any possible way to use a Windows server in conjunction with a Mac, purely for rendering?

Thanks again.

IdahoJ

Jack, if it were me, I'd just buy a dedicated server. Hardware is cheap these days and you can get a decent multicore box for not a lot of money. Put about 8Gb of decent RAM in it and there you go.

Indigo does have the capability to do distributed renderings via a master/slave network management system. It requires additional "floating licenses" for the slave machines and that extra cost may not work for your company. However, having one or two floating licenses and using Indigo's network management would simplify rendering file transfers without the need for another 3rd party program like UltraVNC: http://www.uvnc.com/ or another like it.

Cheers.

JackDamnGood

Thank you for your information, this is something that we are currently looking into, I am interested in finding more solutions before making a decision though, just to clarify, we would require Google Sketchup PRO, and a few of the floating licenses you described for the slave computers?

Many Thanks

Jack

IdahoJ

Hi Jack,
You would require as many floating licenses as you need for the number of computers you want to render from at any one time. Ie; if you have 5 workstations and you would want all 5 to be able to render at the same time, you'd need 5 floating licenses. However, if only two of the five needed concurrent rendering access at any one time, then only two floating licenses are needed. The beauty is, any of the workstations can send rendering jobs to the server, as long as only two of the five are doing it in this example. The licenses are controlled at the server so it's a simple setup. No muss, no fuss.

If you need more workstations to render concurrently, then you can incrementally add floating licenses as needed. This scales nicely and can help match your growth without overspending on licensing costs.

Here's a reference: http://www.indigorenderer.com/features/floatinglicences

As for SU Pro, I don't believe so. I checked the Indigo site and a few others but didn't find anything requiring SU Pro. The Skindigo exporter plugin works with both free and Pro versions. SU 8 IS required however.

The reason I was suggesting just getting a dedicated server is because I have experience in building a rendering farm. Some years ago I built a farm that used POVray over a network using Erlang. At the time I was learning the Erlang language and I had always wanted to build a rendering farm. While the project was successful, it required a lot of tweaking and such to get working decently.

Personally, I think Indigo's network rendering solution is robust, efficient and would give you a very good ROI.

Cheers.