OK, maybe this is a stupid question, but would anyone be interested in a free renderfarm?

Of course you are!  =)

So here's how it works:

You often render pictures and get annoyed that you need many hours to render them? And then there's also times when your CPU just idles around as you are browsing webpages or just listening to music while reading an ebook? You're perfect for the free private render farm project.  =)

How it works? 

• Everyone interested in participating installs a render cow on one of your computers that have the lowest CPU usage. Your workstation would be great, or any other computer that isnt permanently using 100% CPU power.
• You install any dynamic IP service on that computer (i use no-ip.org, they give you 5 free hostnames), enable the rendercow port (5002 by default) in your firewall/router and post the dynip hostname on the participants board.
• In your Hypervue manager you add the other participants nodes.
• finished! Now you can render on all other participants computers, getting enormous combined CPU power

OK, thats my idea. Anyone interested? Before i start working on this as my next project i wanted to know if basically anyone is interested, would be stupid to build up a distributed computing community just for myself.

Questions? Ideas? Comments? Critics? Wishes?

As the creator of the RANCH commercial renderfarm (so very aware of everything related to this subject), I can tell you that a Vue distributed renderfarm won't work.

• internet is too slow in upload for many people. It takes more time to send the scene to a distant node than to render it, when it does not crash. The amount of data to send to each cow is huge. Sending a 100 MB scene to many cows across the internet would be a total nightmare. Performance would be abysmal for this reason.
• Many nodes -> many possibilities for an internet disconnection somewhere and then it's a total mess, as you don't have any control on the distant cows.
• in case of a HyperVue crash, you lose everything. You won't  be able to get the cows back on line, you won't get back the frames nor the tiles, you will become mad :).
• you have no control on distant rendercows. If your friend resets its computer or even change a session, you lose the render. If he wants to play a game, the rendercows drops to 0% CPU and practically doesn't render anything.
• people won't want to give their IP away easily.

there are also other technical reasons but I will stop here :)

I am sorry but it can't work. You are free to try of course. 

I must agree with louguet, the idea in itself sounds fantastic, something I am sure many people would use however the infrastructure is not their to handle the sheer amount of traffic that would be generated.

I recently rendered a scene with the ranch renderfarm, it was 68MB's in size, having to send that to multiple computers would be a nightmare, now if Hypervue split the scene before sending to multiple nodes it would sort out multiple problems with rendering over multiple computers including some nodes crashing.

Jon

Unfortunately the whole scene has to be sent to each cow as all the information in the scene is relevant to do a render. So with 10 cows with a 100 MB scene it's 1 GB to send. Plus the textures must be sent too, plus each cow has to send each frame / tile rendered back, plus other data is exchanged between the server and the cows, etc.