Distributed rendering to a farm would be a great long term feature to build in.
I agree with hogjonny. Distributed building would be great feature in World Machine. Now i have a huge world which compute for 30 hours on 8-core processor. But we have a lot of unused computer in our office. So it will be helpful to include this feature in the future development.
Interesting but it is not easy to manage. What about GPU rendering?
You Use tiled export and export a different set of tiles on different machines, i do not know what your use case is, however we do this at the simulations company i work for to speed up rendering of huge worlds for realtime engine use .
I don’t think it would be such a nice deal, i think most of the expensive devices like erosion actually need a lot of info from the whole input, so correct me if i’m wrong but it’s heavily parallelizeable locally only because it works on a shared input that doesn’t change, but to do the same in a networked situation you’d need to use Xtime the computers in ram (you couldn’t give each one a chunk of work, you’d need to give each one the full data set and tell him, do this chunk of work on the whole set).
This means it probably wouldn’t be faster unless ran on a lot of computer, at which point it’s much faster to run it on a single larger computer & also much cheaper (as soon as you go high res, WM eats up a ton of ram, so you definately don’t want to have to purchase 100GB+ of ram for each computer).
What i did is simply rent a reasonably priced large server, prices are droping like crazy in the server world so you can get something like my server from OVH (16 threads, 256GB of ram) for 300€ month or so, or if you’re willing to go up to 2K€ / month you can get a 80 thread 2TB of ram monster (this is pretty much the largest single computer money can buy afaik, only larger would be doubling the amount of threads and that’s it).
Distributed rendering and rendering on a farm are two different things: Distributed would mean that two or more computers are rendering the same scene at the same time. I understand that this would be difficult to do and would eat up much ram on the host machine. I know that some renderers manage to render huge images (i.e. vray or corona) with a distributed network of machines, but what about world machine? Maybe somebody could share some insight?
But it would be great if there was a “rendering edition” of world machine without the gui that could be used with a render manager software like deadline to send out scenes to the render farm. Very much like the command line editions of various renderers. Maybe it is possible that a tiled build could be distributed to several machines per tile. I could save huge amounts of time if it would be possible submit a world machine build job via deadline to my little render farm. Should not be very hard to do.