People with laptops and desktops, do you use distributed baking / rendering ?

ZacD

Hey Polycounters,

I just recently got a laptop in order to work on 3D art during my down time at work. And I would like to take advantage of using my home PC as a render farm of sorts, especially since my home PC is faster, baking on the laptop makes a lot of heat and noise, and I could keep working on other work on the laptop.

I know about UE4's Swarm (The UDK documentation still applies)

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Swarm.html
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DevelopmentKitContentCreation.html#Swarm%20Setup

But what about other applications like xNormal?

Does anyone here use distributed baking / rendering? What do you use it for?

Is there any other creative uses for having 2 workstations?

passerby

It is possible with xnormal but not out of the box. You would have to write your own scripts to automate it and find your own way to get the data it needs to it.

Though for xnormal if you just use cuda or openCL it goes ultra fast on anything with a ok gpu.

Swarm is nice for things like this, at work we have all the extra computers setup for this purpose.

Something i like to do with the laptop and desktop is use a app called synergy that lets me use my desktop keys and mouse with the laptop as if its a extra monitor. This can be pretty useful at times, even if you only use it for something as basic as a 3rd display.

GhostDetector

For sharing files wirelessly across computers, you can use bittorrent sync

So all you'll need to do is a way to control the computer remotely. (remote desktop software)

Workflow:
-Create project folder
-Sync between Computer 1 and Computer 2
-Bake with Computer 1 and output the destination of the bake into the sync folder.
-Computer 2 automatically syncs those files
-you're done.

ZacD

Why not just use Google Drive / Dropbpx / Skydrive? The advantage of Sync is the unlimited amount of space I guess, and it's more private, but those should work fine for working projects.

I'll have to do some research about how to setup a remote desktop, especially since I don't have a static IP address to work with. I wonder if I can setup something with my domain/hosting to compensate for changing IPs.

Joopson

You could try transferring files through google drive, and accessing your PC with the free version of Teamviewer. I've done that before, and it seemed to work alright.

DireWolf

I do it with Vray all the time. Not sure about other apps.

Lamont

ZacD wrote: »

Why not just use Google Drive / Dropbpx / Skydrive? The advantage of Sync is the unlimited amount of space I guess, and it's more private, but those should work fine for working projects.

I am having serious sync issues with Google Drive lately (3DS Max and ZBrush files).