[bracesport]

hey guys
i managed to get three pcs hooked up ran a couple of renders
at the end it appeared to go thru a merging process
however the result looked remarkably the same off three pcs as i got off one pc
i would have thought that the SL would have been higher off the cooperative render

any ideas??

ps.. i ran maxwell on a twin dual processor machine and it smoked. achieving a sample level equal to a single machine that took 12 hrs in 2.5hrs... more than four times faster. i also noted the processors were all mainlining at 100%cpu use...

[Maxer]

There is a problem with the merge function in cooperative rendering, it may or may not merge all of the separate MXI files together. The image file and MXI file that wound up in your network folder after cooperative rendering was finished probably isn't the actual result of a successful merge process; it's probably just the results of one of your render nodes. To be sure you should collect all the cooperative.mxi files from the Next Limit folder on all of your render nodes and manually merge them together, and then you will know if it worked.

[bracesport]

i can see each node does have an image and a cooperative mxi file

how do you manually merge them?

[Maxer]

You will have to rename each file to something else and then copy them all into a single folder. From there you go to mxcl -d then file/cooperative MXI and you can pick the MXI's you've rendered and also a destination for the new merged MXI they will create.

[bracesport]

cool, done that worked a treat

what is the next step to generate the image

[bracesport]

ok i sorted out the image. thanks for the help

the three merged files are slightly clearer than the single rendered file
ill do another cooperative test vs a single pc over night

the first test was over an hour. prob need more time to seperate three vs one. however i would have thought the network would have got to a higher SL

ill report back!

[Maxer]

It does get to a higher SL but there is no way of knowing what that is right now.

[joie]

Hey.

I did a cooperative render with my last job and found it pretty useless.

I made it with three computers, two of them are half slower than the other one (two times faster), so the second one cooked its image till SL 9 and the two others cooked for a SL of 6...

When I manually merged the .mxi the resulting image was "noisier" than the one cooked till SL 9..., Why is that?

I mean, should the cooperative images be cooked till the SAME SL in order to improve the result?

Thank´s

[zak]

Just to understand this right !
I have to go to each machine and pick up a .tga file. Move it to a new folder together with the rest and then merge them ?
IF I send more jobs, then it will overwrite the old job ? correct ?
If the above is right, then I must say that the system really need some more work before it's sutibel for profesionel work.
Could somebody please clarify ?

Jesper

[robinh]

It's not tga files that need to be merged but .mxi files, if your cooperative render is a success, you must have a cooperative.mxi file in each of your node, rename those files so you can put them in one folder then merge them.
Yes if you send more coop render, your cooperative.mxi files will be overwritten.

[zak]

Yes, i meant .mxi files But I think its a shame that we only can Render one job at time. Is there not a way to give them another name so they will not overwrite ??

But thanks for a quick repley.

Jesper

[Maxer]

No you can only render one job at a time and you’re merging MXI's like the other guy's have said. You’re also correct that cooperative rendering need a lot more work and more development because it's almost useless right now and I don't really know how NL expected us to use it like this.

I've found that cooperative rendering really doesn’t work well at all at low SL levels, it's most effective when doing over nigh work.

[joie]

I think you are right Maxer, it seems there is a minimum SL to be reached untill you can use "MXI merge" with minimal success, so you can shot your scene in four diferent computers with diferent MXI names and merge the result next morning..., only if they have reached something above SL 10 I think...