Is there a known Bryce 3D 7.x Lighting render farm record?
PixelTrope
Posts: 17
I am wondering if people use Bryce Lightning much, either on a LAN, or with a VPN for distributed rendering. I have tested Lighting on remote (internet) computers, using the free gaming VPN Hamachi, and it works. Theoretically, around 253 computers could render the same animation at the same time. My record so far, is a farm I designed and built to render 4096 frames of 4K UHD quality at 24 FPS (170 seconds or 2:50 minute) animations, consisting of 31 PCs. Some stats are: 54 physical cores, 15 virtual cores, 124 GB RAM, averaging 2.4 ghz speed across all 31 CPUs. I get results of about 1000 frames per day or better, depending on content. It renders the famous "abc-wender.br7" test in around 3 minutes and 30 seconds, but most of that is network access time and the time it takes to complile the frame at the end of the render. The render itself is so fast, that I need to test it against a blank render so the network overhead time can be compared, and an acurate time for the actual render figured out.
What have other people been doing with Lightning, perhaps to also render 4K animations?
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PixelTrope - welcome to this forum. Yes, I'm using Lightning on my local network (5 computers) now and then. Once I made it work over the Internet (2 computers). Never used it on VPN. Problem are the ephemeral ports, got to open a range of them on the router and then map them to the appropriate local IP address, which can be a bit difficult. I have only one global IP address (had two when I once tried it over the Internet). I'm not doing animation. I have a PDF on my website 3D CG Documents > Mine > Basics > Lighting (https://horo.ch/docs/mine/pdf/Lightning.pdf). There's a link in the PDF to a page with tests but it doesn't work anymore. I think I removed the file when I made my site anew. When rendering premium, some options are ignored when network rendering, I don't remember which ones.
Thank you. I have 31 PCs running Lightning right now, and have got the famous "abc-wender.br7" test down to just over two minutes (2 minutes, 5 seconds is the best so far.) I'll be developing a long animation to render this week. Also, if a gaming VPN like Hamachi is used on all remote (internet) clients and the Bryce server, then no ports have to be opened on the router, except maybe one or two for Hamachi on the server side, and then that's it.
Very interesting. Hamachi creates a virtual LAN over the Internet, like a Peer-to-Peer network. If you have several computers on your LAN, each one must run "LogMeIn Hamachi" to get a 25.0.0.x IP address if I understand it right - or the NAT is done by the proprietary STUN-like NAT-Transversal technique. All participants must run the program - and Bryce-Lightning, of course.
mmm I was wondering,
sorry for derailing and butting in
could you create several virtual machines on the same desktop and trick 32 bit Bryce into thinking you have a render farm hence using all your RAM and cores?
WendyLuvsCatz - Nice idea, but no. Bryce itself can only send the source file to the Lightning clients and receive the rendered tiles back from them (file and rendered tile in TCP, communications like asking for a new tile and request to send rendered tile back in UDP) and assemble them to the final image. The priority set in Bryce (Low = 1 core, Normal = half the cores but no more than 8, High = all cores max 8) is sent with the source files to all running Lightning clients and also sets their priority according to the available cores. Bryce, like Carrara, has a raytracer, not a pathtracer (well Carrara can use Octane which is a Pathtracer), and only uses the CPUs, no GPUs. Each client can only use the memory available, max 2 GB (though if there are more than 4 GB memory, with LAA this can be boosted up to around 3.2 to 3.5 GB for Bryce as well as Lightning). If you have a big scene, the clients that cannot fit the scene into memory cannot render it. The clients are separate, there's no RAM pooling possible. Note that Bryce is the master and does not render (in Bryce 5 it did) and you have to start the Lightning client also on the machine that runs Bryce.
Not really used Bryce that much, and never touched Lightning or virtual machines, but ... surely if yiu were to have a 'V-brick' (or a massive machine with multiple CPUs and scads of GBs RAM( you could run multiple viirtual machines, each logivally different, and each, thus able to run discrete instances of Lightning, and configured to use just enough RAM to max-out the ability of Bryce (and OS overhead) and enough CPU alloaction to run Ok? I presume the restriction would come down to the networking and what actual/NAT adresses each VM coud use.
was a hypothetical idea anyway as neither of my computers that great
SimonJM - well, I have on one of my Win7 (i7 4 cores with 4 virtual ones, Task Manager sees 8 cores) machines XP and Win2000 as virtual machines installed (they have their own IP addresses in my local network) and I tried once to use Lightning with all three. It worked - but the virtual machines (XP & 2000) only use 1 CPU. No speed increase but an interesting experiment nevertheless.
Yes, you'd need a decent pool of physical resouces to make it worthwhile; I am guessing the main contender would be sufficient CPU/threads (I am not sure if Bryce id core-limited in any way), with RAM running second (at least 4GB free after OS, etc.). Put it down to logically feasible, physically unlikely.
SimonJM - yes, Bryce is core limited: 8 cores. During development, we were at 16 but to serve more cores also needs more memory and with the 2 GB (without LAA) limit, we decided 8 cores would be a good compromise. Not many +8 cores CPU were available at that time, certainly not at sensible price.
Terminology and technology often runat odds with one another, by cores is that theads, so a 6 core system that 'exposes' 12 threads woudl be deemd a 6 core or an 8 thread (max) machine?
OK - not cores, but threads are limited to 8. Windows Task Manager also shows threads, not cores.
Thanks for the clarification - when CPUs started becoming multi-threaded themselves, stuff (like licensing) started getting confusing!
I have been rendering this week with 32 PCs, so the personal core record is now 60 physical cores and 19 virtual cores, for 79 threads rendering at the same time. Thanks to the two people who showed interest and kept this thread going. I'm sure there are many great Bryce projects out there, that never got produced, because "this would take forever to render." If there are any hidden masterpieces out there, maybe we'll be able to collaborate and get them rendered, as now I am at capacity for how many desktops and laptops I can run at the same time at this location. I will continute to upgrade to newer specs and retire older PCs, and I foresee several more winters of rendering animations and poster-size print resolution stills, and by the fall of 2020 I'll have broken 80+ threads!
Lurking here, but fascinated by your successes. Bravo!
Let us know if you post your results.
Cheers,
--ms