Use one local machine as the main renderer (queue jobs from workstations)

Rendering
, ,
#1

Hey Folks,

I have a small lab of Desktops running Rhino7 in a school lab setting. A year or so ago, we built a more powerful workstation to handle the big render jobs (64 core processor, Beefier graphics, and more RAM that seems necessary), which works great. Currently, when rendering on that machine, we’re essentially either copying the files to USB or a network share and then going and manually queuing the render on that machine.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to have it such that students could simply work on their designs most of the class, and then queue it up for rendering at the end of class… and the main machine simply renders it on its own, saves etc. I thought I read about this possibility somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I remember what the feature was called or if I found any actual information on how to do it. Essentially, it’d be a farm of one computer, local network. Any help / wikis on this, is this even possible right now?

Thanks,

#2

The built-in Rhino renderer doesn’t have ‘render farm’ capability, most 3rd-party rendering solutions do.

#3

Can you make any suggestions on what I could use? Ideally free or that has educational discounts…

#4

The 800-lb gorilla is Vray. I use Iray.

#5

I was thinking about your request… I would try to run a scheduled task on the Rendering Machine that search for files in a shared folder, open them in Rhino and start/save the render (in Rhino you can set a command list to run at startup Rhino Options → General → Command Lists), close the file and move it to another shared folder (so it won’t be processed again).
The users will put their files ready for rendering in the shared folder and after a while they would find the image in another shared folder…
This is only a suggestion, I didn’t checked if it can work or if it will be a nightmare to make it work.
Probably you’ll need to know how to script in Rhino to have all the tasks accomplished.