Comments on: Free rendering on 250-CPU Grid

By: Zsolt

Zsolt — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:15:24 +0000

Actually, here is a fresh announcement:

Enhanced rendering services for our academic users – we need your help

While keeping the operation of the current portal intact our team at the University of Westminster is working on a new rendering portal that will provide more advanced services for our academic users. This new version of the portal will allow access to large Grid infrastructures with much more processing power than what the current solution can provide. And it will still be free! In order to achieve our goal please help us to define the requirements of this portal. If you work at a university or research institute and are interested in using the new rendering portal
for your teaching or research then please contact us on the e-mail address below: rendering@lists.cpc.wmin.ac.uk

By: Zsolt

Zsolt — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:12:07 +0000

Hi Everybody,

The project is not dead at all, it's just that most of the communication happens by email. I'll be more active in the forums from now on providing updates. I hope you'll be interested.

We do have technical difficulties every now and then but we do our best to keep the service running. Let me share some statistics: you have submitted over 8800 Blender jobs generating more than 463000 frames totaling 180 GB in image files over the last 6 months. We've donated over 56000 CPU hours so far. The busiest month was July when you rendered 102000 frames.

We've spent some time experimenting with the portal to see how we could get more processing power. Check back soon for announcements!

Cheers,
Zsolt

By: Linoprit

Linoprit — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 08:50:00 +0000

Bummer! Seems to be dead here…

By: forthfriend1

forthfriend1 — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:03:25 +0000

I agree with Harald! Without this service I would not have finished a project in time…

Please tell me why it is down!!!

Cheers,
Christian

By: Linoprit

Linoprit — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:54:14 +0000

Hi folks!

I tried to log in to the grid page (http://rendering-portal.cpc.wmin.ac.uk/) today. The site seems to be down.
Is this just for service, or is the grid service closed?

Would be a pity! It's a really usefull thing!

Cheers,
Harald

By: SS

SS — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:23:15 +0000

Takes a very lng time after i click video,

ddoesn'twnlaod

By: mkn

mkn — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:17:12 +0000

Hello. Thanks for this service! I'm trying to do particles too. It seems when I do hair or particles that cant be baked, it works, but when PS needs baking, it does not work. Is there a workaround for this, like a way to convert particles to objects with animation? (CTRL-SHIFT-A only makes parts real but looses all anim..)

Cheers!
Mkn.

By: Zsolt

Zsolt — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:00:10 +0000

@Markus: Thanks for your help! I'll put this info into the report about the portal.

By: Markus

Markus — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:49:18 +0000

@Zsolt:

I think I know why you are having trouble with particles. When blender calculates particles (and the same for cloth and softbodies, if i'm not mistaken) it puts all the baked data into an external file. Since the users are only asked to upload the blend files and not their blendcache folder where the particle data is stored. But even if you ask the users to upload the particle data you have the task of distributing the right sim data files to the right frames.

By: OriginalBBB

OriginalBBB — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:03:14 +0000

Look at this image. What is in This that could be particels?

Or i'm hurting the time wall? Though this don't seem to dispendious for me, since with my pc AMD athlon 64 5200 Ghz it takes me 30-50 mins to render

http://img508.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bianconataleit1.jpg

There are stars made with the built-in blender world option, thare lamps, normal mesh and halos