I've read that the new C4 will have networking capabilitys. Does this mean a small network of computers, say three, will render frames 3 times as quick, or will it only work with animations, each computer doing a frame each? Will we be able to build render farms, and will we need a copy of C4 for each machine? Groucho

Groucho, It won't be quite 3x as fast, there is some overhead in shipping the scene information across the network and stitching the results back together. Some really simple scenes may actually render slower because of that overhead. It will break up a single frame. It's almost like watching it render on a multiprocessor box with a bunch of CPUs. If you had 2 dual processor boxes and a single processor box, you'd see 5 render squares on the screen. During beta I had 7 CPUs (5 machines) working on the same render. It was pretty neat to see. There is a seperate installer for the render node. I believe it was mentioned earlier that C4 Pro would support 5 render nodes included with the price, but I'm not positive on the exact number. Regards, Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild 3D plug-ins for Carrara http://digitalcarversguild.com

Next question, i have 1 pc and 2 macs, will i be able to cross-platform renderings? regards, E

It won't go across platforms. Regards, Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild 3D plug-ins for Carrara http://digitalcarversguild.com

If you're serious animator on a large project. I would suggest you to split some frames for pc to do it individually. For example a scene with 3 minute worth (30fps x 3 minutes = 5400 frames), split it in 3 parts for 3 PCs which is 1800 frames. You get more done than the node method.

True, you do get more done splitting the frames up across machines, but being able to render single test frames with multiple machines allows for higher quality GI renders and/or quicker renders. A reason I've stayed away from alot of GI is the testing phases are killers for time! Eric - Have you done any animation renders to see if what GWeb says would be quicker? Or would the 'render-farm' approach built-in be quicker? Or, to push the envelope further, if one was to have multiple installs of the master, and sets of 5 computers hooked to each, would you be able to split frames across multiple masters, and then have 5 slaves each to speed up high-quality sequenced frame animations? (Of course, one would also need multiple liscenses of C4... but you get my drift...)

I haven't tried splitting frames. I suspect that it would be quicker, though of course a little more labor intensive. If you did it a lot you could probably script the copy and the tweaking of the CAR file. You could certainly combine aspects of both to get the most of your hardware.

And when you're ready to set up your render farm, contact me and I'll give you a great deal on site licenses for DCG plug-ins! ;)

Regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D plug-ins for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com