Wood Walls and Yadra

The house model is coming along slowly, but I hope to do some more work to it on the plane during my business trip today and tomorrow. I have added a screen material to the porch, along with a possible wood panelling for the walls.

This second one is a bit dark, but I just sort of threw a lamp in there. I don’t think that the shadows are quite right on the floor, so I’ll have to look into proper shadows on an image texture.

I have also been playing around with the network rendering program YADRA. What yadra basically does is take multiple networked computers and render an animation using all of them, instead of just one. You can see the advantages because while one computer is working on one image, another can be working on a different image, so it should definitely reduce rendering time for larger animations.

As of right now I have three computers at home networked together, an old laptop that I used in college, my old desktop computer from work that I use for music, and my current laptop that I travel with. The specs for the machines are as follows:

1 x Dell Optiplex GX270, 2.8GHz Pentium 4, 1gb RAM, Windows XP

1 x Dell Latitude D600, 1.6GHz Pentium M, 512mb RAM, Linux Fedora 9

1 x HP Pavilion DV6000, 2GHz Centrino Duo, 2gb RAM, Windows Vista

I used my Gingerbread Man animation for a quick render test on each machine and got the following times:

Optiplex: 1 min 26 sec

Latitude: 2 min 8 sec

HP: 44 sec

Theoretically with all three networked together and rendering the same file the overall time would be less than all of those, however I didn’t expect that with such a small quick animation. The computers still have to transfer the files back and forth, which takes up some time. On a larger animation you wouldn’t notice this time as much, but I expected something a little slower than 44 seconds on this file. I ran all three computers and was rewarded with a time of 54 seconds.

This isn’t too bad and was about what I expected. The frame distribution was as follows:

Optiplex: 13 frames

Latitude: 12 frames

HP: 15 frames

It makes sense that the fastest computer (also the master in my case) rendered the most frames. I am going to try a larger scale test later this week by rendering a part of the creature factory DVD trailer. I’ll hopefully see a bigger performance increase with all three computers running.