Render Question....

dkendig · 21 Jun 2013, 04:27

you're quite welcome. I like how it was just snuck in to a minor beta release Wonder what the next one will have! Oooooh

ashscott · 22 Jul 2013, 12:59

This thread is really helpful but I want to get more input from you folks who have a little more rendering experience.

I do object animations from time to time that require rendering and they can be from anywhere between 30 seconds and four minutes. I currently use Twilight and I love its ease of use as I don't do this enough to justify learning all the ins and outs of complex render software. However, when I do a longer object animation at higher resolutions in Twilight it really makes my machine (i7 laptop with Nvidia GPU) work its guts out and the animations take an inordinate amount of time.

There seems to be very little support from render farms for Twilight, I understand that this is because it is based on KT and KT isn't very network render friendly.....

What I need is a renderer that I can preview short animations with by rendering overnight on my local laptop and then send off to a renderfarm once Im happy with the final job. I love Twilight but I'm not sure it is the right tool for this.

I have checked out Thea, Maxwell and Indigo and they all seem to support multiple nodes.

What do people recommend as good "bang for buck"?

If you recommend Thea, please explain why it won't face the same network render limitations as Kerkythea.

I'm also interested as to how difficult it would be to run renders on AWS with these renderers that support multiple nodes....

tibet · 22 Jul 2013, 18:40

hi,

i´ve a question if you don´t mind.

there´are many excellent rendering apps for sketchup, many of them almost perfect.

some of them are almost unbeatable like vray.

lumion and keyshot are easy to use with cool effects, and with plenty of materials.

a friend of mine is curious, if there is any renderer to have the same qualities

together like those three i mentioned.

i hope to find the answer here , eventhough everyone usually votes for his/her product

has been using. so i mean the best impression, when you see eg. tut on youtube and so on.

thanks for understanding !

notareal · 24 Jul 2013, 16:23

@ashscott said:

If you recommend Thea, please explain why it won't face the same network render limitations as Kerkythea.

Kerkythea never been planned to use in any larger render farms, only with few nodes (still some have used it with Amazon EC2 http://www.kerkythea.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7051). It's safe to say that there are issues in KT network rendering, but it works if you have time to fiddle...

On the other hand Thea has rather robust network rendering and it has actual build in support for farms. You can build your own farm with tutorials available here http://www.thearender.com/cms/index.php/resources/render-farms.html or use some commercial farms.

ashscott · 25 Jul 2013, 04:35

So Thea is built differently to KT? - My assumption was that they are built on the same base...

The example you linked to on the KT forum is pretty elementary - I haven't seen anything with KT that supports multiple instances...

notareal · 25 Jul 2013, 09:18

@ashscott said:

So Thea is built differently to KT? - My assumption was that they are built on the same base...

It's different. Twilight uses Kerkythea engine, but Thea is a different beast. If you have more Thea related questions, please join into http://www.thearender.com/forum/

@ashscott said:

The example you linked to on the KT forum is pretty elementary - I haven't seen anything with KT that supports multiple instances...

You mean at EC2? If you read carefully http://www.kerkythea.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=62415#p62415
"... it is possible to network render inside EC2 by opening two instances...".

or in just local network between your own computers http://www.kerkythea.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4234

Like said, KT network rendering is pretty crude and requires manual scene management... PITA to handle if you have several nodes.

ashscott · 25 Jul 2013, 10:08

Thanks for the info - thats a lot of help.

I do so many hacky little tricks with SU that I've reached a point where I just want solid stuff that works, rather than spending time trying to figure out whats going wrong and where (entirely my fault most of the time)

Ash