modo network rendering

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy_TEw2l0XI

http://blog.irisproservices.com/2009/01/02/network-rendering-in-modo/



http://www.luxology.com/support/

Can you explain some more about the performance of the network rendering capabilities of modo?

modo’s built in distributed rendering is based on Bonjour. Bonjour comes with every Mac computer and is bundled with the Windows version of modo. You can use a combination of Windows and Mac machines to render across a network. Once a Bonjour connection is working between your master computer and other workstations that have modo running in “Slave” mode, modo will show the buckets being computed by other computers as different colors in the render window on the Master system. modo can also be run in a headless or command line fashion, which can be handy for rendering. The built-in network rendering in modo is best suited to fewer large frames that take a long time to render, and is especially useful when rendering large stills. The biggest gains with modo’s built-in network rendering will be for high resolution images that are dominated by bucket rendering time (as opposed to pre-pass time), such as scenes using non-cached indirect illumination, blurry reflections, depth of field, subsurface scattering, complex refraction, etc. If you have lots of small, fast frames to render the built-in network rendering is not ideally suited for this. These are best rendered with a conventional “one frame per processor” render controller from a third-party, such as the ones from GwynneR, Paul Lord and others. These control modo in a more conventional manner, where each instance of modo/modo_cl is operating independently of the others, but in unison with a controller that divvies out specific frames for each individual machine.

modo Rendering

Network Rendering

modo can be used on up to 50 Mac or PC workstations for network rendering; it is multi-threaded to use all available cores on each of your systems. Setup is extremely easy and is largely automatic; Systems set up in “slave” mode will accept buckets (tiles) to be rendered from a “master’ machine.

The image to the left shows network rendering in progress in modo. On the screen are buckets being rendered locally (gold color) and on the network (in blue). Each bucket corresponds to a single “core” on a local or network machine. The underlying network technology is Apple Bonjour.

“modo network render slaves are effortless to setup. modo finds and starts using the slaves automatically, without hassle.”

Michael Blackbourn
VFX artist
The Embassy Visual Effects Inc.