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Exactly. Always a risk - especially if you're not a computer guru, being able to fix things when things go awry.
Both of them come with Quadro workstation graphics cards. Never tried one. The Higher priced one has the Quadro 2000, the other has the Quadro 1800
No idea how good those are - especially compared to that GTX you have now ;)
Pretty low bids so far on both of those machins - and the auction ends tomorrow. Tough call.
Holy Ten-toes, Bat Man!
I didn't have much time... again. But it was killing me.
So I went to Control Panel > Networking > sure enough... Homegroup was there!
Clicked on that and set up (for the first time) a system which allows my computers to share with one another. Super-Simple, just like JonStark explained. So I did that to my Carrara workstation... Bam!
I think it might have been Kendall Seers who told me that Render Nodes must be 'hard-wired', meaning that we can't just go wireless... we need to actually plug our machines into a router, which joins them physically. At least in my case, he was right. I can share like mad, but Carrara won't "see" my workstation's running Render Node via the wireless connection.
I must admit, I was worried that, since this laptop is always wireless, just plugging it in might not be enough. I might have to look up to perform some kind of voodoo spell on it or something.
Nope. Worried for naught!
I have a wonderful long Ethernet cable going from the wireless router to my workstation, but the rest of them are short little things. So just to try this out, I snugged my laptop up next to the router and plugged it in. Ran upstairs to fire up Carrara 8.5 Pro Render Node. Then I added a simple scene to the Batch Queue, went to Enable Network Rendering, then to "Manage Networks" and, to my delight... there it was, in all its glory - my workstation connection!
With one hand on the mouse - ready to enlarge the render window, and the other hand on the "Print Screen" button, I launched the render.
I actually cancelled it a few times because all I saw were my laptop's four cores chiming in. After a few tries, it occurred to me to just let it go and see if the other eight would kick in... sure enough! Thank goodness my finger was still by that Print Screen button... it was all over in 46 seconds! LOL
Thanks JonStark!
You know what this means? Do ya?
Well let me tell you...
...it means that I can use my convenient little lappy to design animations, save them out, and render them in Batch!
This little laptop would die any other way! LOL
...and I'd die of old age before getting anything done! ;)
I still prefer to work at my workstation, but due to other parts of life... that gets harder and harder every day.
That's awesome Dart! But I have to disagree, the nodes do not have to be connected via ethernet; they can be wireless and will still work. I know because my home router only has 4 ethernet ports, and when I got the 5th machine I couldn't connect them all (well, I could have gone and picked up a switch from Best Buy so that I was able to split the ports and add some more, but why spend money if we don't have to, right?). One of my 2 laptops is completely wireless, but is still recognized as a render node, so it can be done that way too if needed (more good news, right?)
Heheh, it's also true that the slower nodes will take longer to calculate the scene and get rendering, so the primary machine (especially if it's much more powerful and faster) can get a jump on things
Hmm, I suspect I see a pretty good deal coming up for auction-ending in just a few hours, a Dell T5500 dual Xeon E5620 server with 12 GB memory (but no harddrive, OS, or power adapter) currently bid at $120 (though it has a $30 shipping surcharge in the US) and is closing the auction at 4am pacific time. So far only 3 people have bid on it at all, and I suspect at that time of the day there won't be a horde of people awake and interested in a business server to bid up the price monstrously high (though I could be wrong, which is also fun). I'm not bidding on it myself (because I definitely don't need it), but I thought I would mention if anyone else is interested, and more to the point as an example of the kind of prices these types of awesome render nodes can be had for nowadays.
I'm channeling my new ebay obsession into simply watching the good deals in auction count down instead of joining in, I find it nearly as interesting how quickly an amazing deal can suddenly spike upwards in bidding and become a bad deal instead, and those final 5 seconds are equally fascinating to me whether someone gets an incredible deal and no other bids come in, or whether a ton of bids come in and the price changes dramatically.
Fantastic, Dart - good work on getting the node network going! I totally agree with Jonstark about wired vs wireless: my whole network is wireless, and all nodes show up fine. Not sure why your wireless doesn't work, but the wired does - perhaps it's a router thing? Could be that on wireless connections, port 5020 is blocked (that's what Carrara is using to communicate to the nodes). But usually, a router doesn't differentiate on the port blocking front between wired and wireless. Just wanted to let you know that in principle, an all-wireless node setup is definitely possible.
Also, in the render room, under miscellaneous, you can select Manage Render Nodes and see all available nodes on your network. You can even disable nodes you don't want to participate. It's good to bring this up during a render too and see which node is where: on animations, it'll show you which frame they're all rendering. You can even kick off a network render and then add other nodes while it's already running.
It's all soooo much fun!!
Btw, I see that Dell t5500 went for $120, I was right on that no one else would be bidding at 4am pacific time
Someone out there got a pretty sweet deal, but I suspect a careful observer can probably find excellent savings like this on potentially awesome render nodes all the time (and lower and lower prices for this tech as time goes on).
had a dream a z600 followed me home.
@Jonstark That's exactly how it works! My Z600 was so cheap because the listing finished at 9am in the morning EST. If ever you sell something on eBay, make use of the scheduling feature. Otherwise, the listing goes on at the time you press "submit".
@MistyMist
Cool! I'll hold off on ordering my 35' cable and try again. Maybe there was just something simple on my end, since I had just installed the Node (on my workstation) and had it fired up for the first time. Hard to say - I'll try again today. Would be nice to go wireless - especially now that wireless routers are night and day different in speeds compared to back when I was told they don't work.
For the way I set things up, I relly don't need to get addicted to E-Bay... Yikes! I remember how that alone can steal a person's whole day, and then some... and then some more. Things we don't even need! LOL
I do prefer the "Buy Now" button, and always look for those first - even if I end up paying a little more. Saves me having to 'watch'. I certainly will not go with an auto-bid function, that's for sure!
My laptop is definitely the slower machine - so even if my render node is slowed to that GHz per core, my workstation just idles at the 1.5GHz of this thing, but the eight extr cores make a huge difference. But I'd guess that my workstation probably renders faster on its own that being used as a node for this laptop... but the ability to be able to access it while I'm not locked in my office is just too convenient to not use!
Next I want to follow more of Jay's notes and try Remote Desktop stuff. If I use that, I'm wondering if I can just open Carrara remotely, give it a batch queue and launch, rather than even using it as a node. That would really be nice!
That sure works, Dart! I have a couple of Mac Minis in a data center, and sometimes I start a batch queue on one of them and let it render for as long as it takes. The great thing is that I can upload a file to Dropbox and start and monitor the queue even form my phone! The same principle of course applies on your local network: as long as the other computer is switched on, you can remote in and start the node from your desktop (saves you walking up the stairs and all). Let me know if you have any questions!
Poor Jon is addicted to eBay auctions now! I remember a photogrpaher buddy of mine in London was bitten by the same bug: he stayed up all night watching US auctions for medium format cameras, and bought loads of them. Hardly used them, but the idea of being able to buy something once valuable for next to nothing was too tempting. The gambling aspect is not to be underestimated! It's part of the fun indeed!
Jay, you've got me addicted to this ebay thing
Thanks for turning me on to the bidding process, I never realized how entertaining it could be to watch this stuff lol. Did your friend not ever resell the super deals he found? It seems to me you could actually turn this obsession into a way to make a little profit on the side (or maybe that's my new addiction prompting me to make excuses for buying stuff I don't need...)
Sidenote: I now keep humming Weird Al's 'Ebay' all the time. (If you haven't had the pleasure, it's set to the tune of 'I want it that way' and is hilarious).
LOL! Yeah... Whew!
Hmmm... maybe it's because I'm doing it backwards - running my Main Carrara Machine as the render node, and using my laptop as the Main Computer.
But I still cannot access my Render Node (Workstation) through Carrara via wireless. I need to plug in to the router directly. (Ethernet Cable)(I have a 35' cable in my cart at Newegg)
I just tested it.
For this test, I created a scene I need for my movie. No characters, just a simple scene of Starry Sky with Earth 33% lit - then vanishing... to be used as a backdrop for leaving Earth.
Rendering Starry Sky works best at 0.5 Object Accuracy. But in animations, it's pretty much manidory, unless you don't mind twinkling stars. For this, I turned up the antialiasing as well. 4 seconds at 30 frames/second - AVI Full Frames.
I also used Cripeman's awesome technique of using Basic Shape - Sphere Volumetric Cloud to simulate the atmosphere - which really works well. Subtle and unnoticeable unless you're looking to see if the artists added an atmosphere.
Saved my scene so I could load it in Queue, and here's where I've discovered that... nope. Just like yesterday, no access to the workstation.
After plugging in to the router - bang! There it is!
So I launch and, like Jay suggested, opened up the Manage Networks box.
Wow! With that box open I saw that my laptop was happily working on Frame 1, and Render Node was on Frame 4. WTF?
It certaily didn't take me long to open that window. Then it was on Frame 5, then 6. Laptop still on 1 - Oh... now it's rendering Frame 7! LOL
So the whole thing took one 17:31. That's seventeen minutes, thirty-one seconds!!! ;)
I love that!!!
Now I have to do it again without the animated cloud layer. Just looks too funky like that! LOL
Try checking to confirm that you can see the other computer in the my network then if so check you firewall on both machines as it may be blocking the ports used by Render Node.
I'll try the latter. I'm already enjoying the Homegroup connection in all other ways than the Render Node. Thanks for the idea... can't believe I haven't tried that already!
I did already tell my Firewall and AV to "Allow" it upon its first asking... so I guess I assumed that it was setup okay already. But I shouldn't assume. I'll go in and have a look - thanks again! ;)
Yeah... not sure if I'll need to add more cores. So far I'm not having any timing issues getting my animations rendered ;)
May just do so anyways - just for the fun of it - when I can!
There are some folks I'd like to get some cash to first, though! :)
Xeon E5-2699 v4 22Core/44Thread
http://ark.intel.com/products/91317/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2699-v4-55M-Cache-2_20-GHz
drool
£3780.98 with free shipping!
x2 lol, need the dual
88 threads - oh myyy - faints at the notion. but , only 1 thread for the light calculations.
Better overclock that to 16GHz then!
Imagine voiding the warranty to OC a $4,000.00 chip! Two of them!!!???
In my years of setting up for animation rendering, I've been working in a mode suggested by Jeremy Birns without even knowing it - without reading his book yet - and that is to avoid those types of calculations in my renders, due to the fact that they must occur for every frame - slugging down the whole process. It probably shows in my still renders.
But I've spent those years working hard on ways to make up for this - shaders, lighting, rendering fast. Something like an 88 core setup would zip through one of my frames in just a second or two, I think. It would be hard to see the buckets.
It gets hard to folloow them on my eight core sometimes - if I don't have Rosies hair in the scene ;)
While it's an awesome achievement, for far less than the cost of that one single CPU you could assemble a render farm with far more rendering threads at a higher GHz.
But it would be interesting to see what that cpu is going for in 5 years, maybe it will come down in price to be affordable for us hobbyiests? Wouldn't that be something...
Which brings up an interesting point.
I'm glad that I didn't wait when I built my eight core. Back then eight core was new - so I was thinking that the following year would bring ten or twelve to the PC market. Nope. There might be a really expensive six core with hyperthreading up to twelve, but my eight core is still a force to be reckoned with.
It's so freaking fast, too... I'm so darned happy with this thing.
I originally began building computers (for myself only) using yesteryear's great stuff at lower price points. This was just so that I could have something - period. My Eight-Core was the first PC of the Day I've ever built, and I love it.
But seeing you guys getting these amazing deals on stuff is SO inspiring to me!
It's got me wanting to (some time when I have the resources) see about finding a machine similar to my own build - heck, or something entirely different - who rerally cares, right? Something with eight or more fast cores to add to my system... it's just a fun thought! Maybe even more than one!
As a side note, my eight core also renders Iray pretty well too - in cpu mode (since it doesn't recognize my ATI card - which works quite well with LuxusCore)
Work just Purchased 20 of the Dell dual servers with that processer Waiting for them to come in. Hopefully I can convince them that I need to borrow wone to test out..........
or at least borrow one that it is replacing with 36 threads.
BTW, Seeing some Lenovo D20 dual Xeon systems coming up for auction at ludicously low prices (like $49 with no bids). Looked closer and the guy refuses to ship anywhere, you have to be willing to come pick it up in Burlingame, California lol
However on the off chance any of the Carrarists on the forum live out there, there's a sweet deal to be had. They won't ship and it's pick up only, but they charge a $1.50 shipping charge on top of the bid for you to pick it up, which made me laugh. Sounds like kind of a jerk, but hey the pricetag is pretty good, would be worth the drive if I lived in the area for sure, so thought I would mention. On the other hand, maybe he's just a serial killer who is trying to lure server enthusiasts in...
secret lake on that babe-eh,
Lenovo was IBM, bak in the day, i think, yeah, pretty sure. had a lenovo 486/dx66
I didn't know that, so I looked it up. Looks like Lenovo bought IBM's personal computer side of the business, and then later bought IBM's server line much more recently (weirdly per the article I read, they acquired IBM's server lineup *after* some of these servers like the d20 thinkstation had already been brought to market. I guess maybe IBM started branding them as Lenovo long before the actual acquisition. Lenovo also bought Motorola too.
I always wondered what happened to IBM's computers, guess they turned into Lenovo. Now I wonder what IBM does these days, even though I know they are still a huge company that must do something.
they still do aix, F50 servers still out there.
worked about 20 years in mis, mostly on ths AS400. greenbar paper, lol. decolating >.<
kids today never seen carbonpaper
IBM has their name on some of today's top-notch cpus:
my m/b specs lists Core i7-4790K (4.0Ghz, 4C, HT, L3:8M, HD Graphic, 88W, rev.C0)
new cpu over 300$ mebbe santa bring 1.
i looked in desktop, cant see how to gently move the heatsink off to see the cpu
i see an arrow on one peg