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[sedlja]

Steve, ART is just great, but still, one thing i think anim8or really needs is some form of multithreading, it's cool that i can watch Lost meantime i render, but for greater images it takes long with one core. So, will there be some form of MT?

[Steve]

Yeah, multithreading would really speed up ray tracing.  Unfortunately it's not that simple to do it correctly in general.  Speeding up the rendering of a single frame would require that I completely rewrite the way that all of the random number generators work for the samplers.  It might be possible to do two frames in parallel, however, but that would use twice as much memory.

[startrekfan001]

well what about if you write in that last option, two frames in parallel, and make a switch, so the users with enough memory can turn it on and the rest leaves it off? if it's not too hard, i think this would be a great feature.

[gzs]

Why just 2? An Intel  core 2 quad has 4 cpus...

Another  possibility is to write a plugin to use Gelatto, a renderer of nvidia, very fast. This kind of think we users can do, who's volunteer??

[karate5662]

whenever i need to render a long animation or a shorter one with a lot of detail, I open multiple windows of anim8or. That way i can render and animation that would normally take 20 hours of rendering in about 5. After i finish I use virtualdub to put the .avi's together.

just a nice work-around i've done. multithreading would still be nice.

a note here for steve: I've noticed that the further the rays have to travel, the longer the render takes. if you put a spher around the camera with a diameter of 1 000 and render, it will be noticibly shorter that a render with a sphere with a diameter of 10 000. nothing major though.

[Steve]

I am adding multithreading but not for rendering multiple frames simultaneously or to speed up a single frame.  That would be a large amount of work.  The reason I'm doing it is to make Anim8or more Vista friendly.  Vista kills programs that don't respond to messgaes in 10 seconds or so which doesn't let you render anything interesting.  I'll use one thread to process messages and one to render.

[flametiger74]

Thanks Steve.

[Tanzim]

Out of curiosity, how long (estimate) would it take to add 'Render Farm' support (the method where multiple computers hook-up to each other to help render the one frame faster, or several frames simultaneoulsy)?

[thecolclough]

it's an interesting idea, tanzim, but then how many of us, this side of Pixar, have enough computers to be able to make render farming a worthwhile addition to anim8or?  i suspect a large proportion of the anim8or 'fanbase' have only one machine, or maybe two, and part of the joy of this program is that it can run quite happily on a single machine, and not need pixar-sized piles of hardware.

if you want to split up your render over multiple machines, all you have to do is put anim8or.exe and your .an8 file onto each one, and then assign one to render the first hundred frames (as an example), the second machine to do the second hundred frames, etc, and then put all the video files back onto the same machine via a data key or something.



- colclough

[csf]

I could be 100% wrong on this but I believe render farms can be done with out actually having the program directly support it.

I will say that a home made computer cluster (basically the same as a render farm) is not an easy thing to accomplish and very few users will effectively be able to set one up. Its not a simple as connecting two computers together with a wire and running a program.

[kreator]

Another  possibility is to write a plugin to use Gelatto, a renderer of nvidia, very fast.

That sounds a very good idea, Any possibility Steve, as you work for them! 

[Blank Studios]

doesn't Gelatto use Nvidia's GPU's for Fixed/Floating point calculations (hence the speed)? I know there's a password cracker I read about that used the GPU of a graphics card and could crack an 8 character Vista password in 2-3 days.... on a high end graphics card. (normal quad core, cpu time would take about 3-5 months)

lol... and as a side note... I could run a renderfarm... I have 4 computers right now, and I'm working on setting up 2 more, but anim8or doesn't need to support renderfarms, there's an opensource program that will work fine for renderfarms, I can't remember the link, but If I come across it again, I'll put it up here... no more work arounds with 8 different anim8or exe's running

EDIT: I guess that had little to nothing to do with the Preview... but felt I should mention it for some reason...

[kreator]

As Nvidia are not supporting Gelato any longer so they are offering Gelato Pro previously $1500 free now ! ..... pity it only works with Maya and 3DSMax......

[Tanzim]

Pity on those who actually paid!

[Steve]

It's a bit of work to make a version of Anim8or that just renders.  I should have planned for that from the start but I didn't.  Maybe someday.

As for render farms, you can buy very cheap time form a number of places on the web.  Google for render farm services.