Talk:Render farm

kudos

Great job 213.253.39.xxx! You turned a pitiful stub into a great little article with all the essentials. --maveric149, Sunday, April 28, 2002

why it's called a render “farm”

209.19.96.75 (Talk | contribs) added this:

By the way, know why it’s called a render “farm”?
When Pixar first wrote Renderman, they deployed it on a few computers that were all in the same room (big computers, small room). An imaginative engineer added a line of code to the program that would have the computer play a sound when a frame completed. Someone had already host-named all the computers in the room after different animals, so the logical conclusion was to have the sound played be the sound from that animal. They could listen to the sounds and tell which computers were completing frames and which ones were hung. Hence the render farm was born.

I could not verify this on the internet. I would love it if it were true though, that would be awesome. As they say, "Please make sure your changes are are based on verifiable sources." —Wikibarista 05:16, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Emailed Pixar for verification --Pmkpmk 12:54, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Did they get back to you? I think I heard something like this before, but I suppose it's somekind of computing urban legend. There's no speaker on rendering computers. It'd be nice to have this debunked (or verified!!)''F3-R4'' 22:27, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

First, I'm pretty sure "render farm" is derived from the term "server farm", which predates the render farm. Second, a render farm contains a lot of computers, way more than the number of typical barnyard animals. Thirdly, even if you could come up with enough barnyard animals to name an entire render farm, now some engineer needs to go and find sound files for each and every one? No, I don't think so! --24.86.245.68 (talk) 04:48, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Commercial application comments

Render Queue, commercial applications, common troubles., etc, could be added to this article. —Wikibarista 23:53, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Do all articles need to be long? I'll see what I can do... --Pmkpmk 12:54, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Oddly, any attempt I've made to add references to commercial applications has been met with a "no spam" comment by others. Granted, I've included my own commercial application each time, but have not removed others' when they were present and on my most recent attempt included some other commercial applications (render queues and the like) in an attempt to keep things non-biased. So what is the actual Wikipedia policy regarding linking to commercial sites, and where is that policy written? --Early Ehlinger [ResPower] (previous comment posted from 24.214.236.20)

Hi Early, welcome to Wikipedia. The commercial applications I was referring to were not software programs, but the application of a render farm in a commercial environment. Who uses them, and how.

To answer your question anyway, Wikipedia doesn't have strict policies, but policies and guidelines if you want to better understand. Go there and look around. As for why many of us don't feel that it's appropriate to put a link to a web site for a business, I think it's because it simply advertises a service and subsequently some other products, with no real context. There are many, many, many products involved in this render queues, and it must not seem appropriate to us that it be featured in the article. It doesn't help with the explanation of a render queue.

There are many more people who can write all this a lot more eloquently, and I'm sure they have, so I'd instead encourage you to read those policies and guidelines, the vanity guidelines (especially the section Vanity vs: encyclopedic, External link spamming, and what Wikipedia is not. If you still feel that it is important to use Wikipedia for your link, then there is always the larger community to determine whether or not it should be included here. Sorry if it sounds so pedantic, I'm trying my best to explain it all. Please consider becoming a Wikipedian and creating an account. See this welcome message —Wikibarista 06:08, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi Wikibarista, Thanks so much for explaning things and giving good pointers to the detailed policies involved. I think part of what bothers me is that there appears to be a bias in the Wikipedia against any mention of commercial services. BURP, for example, is simply a non-commercial alternative to services like the one that I offer, and yet its presence on this page and indeed in Wikipedia as a whole goes completely unchallenged. Does its presence here really offer anything that a discussion about commercial render farms does not? -- Early Ehlinger, 14 March 2006 —The preceding comment was added by Earlye (talk • contribs) 18:55, 14 March 2006 (UTC) Please sign your posts with ~~~~

I have removed the links to Rebus for the same reason that others have removed the links to ResPower. Not to be petty, but if links to my service should not be allowed, then links to other services likewise should be removed. -- Early Ehlinger. —The preceding comment was added by Earlye 27 June 2007

I have removed the links to render-it for the same reason that others have removed the links to ResPower. Not to be petty, but if links to my service should not be allowed, then links to other services likewise should be removed. -- Early Ehlinger. —The preceding comment was added by Earlye 2 Jan 2009 —Preceding undated comment was added at 18:32, 2 January 2009 (UTC).

Dr Queue

Would drqueue fit here ? drqueue.org . It was used for elephants dream and it's open source. Thanks. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 87.216.187.247 (talk) 6 September 2006.

I think there's a fine line between spamming and citing notable softwares. Like in this article, renderman (PRman) should be cited because it is the de facto leader in the entertainment industry, right? Along with mental ray to a lesser extent.''F3-R4'' 22:19, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Gross generalization?

"As a rule of thumb, CG images take roughly an hour per frame to render."

At what quality? what resolution? how detailed is the scene? this line is completely fallacious in its current context, rendering a 100x100 picture of a square will take under a second. Rendering hugely complex scenes of massive size could take many hours or even days. Also entirely dependent on the CPU speed of the computer and how many computers in the render farm. I'm assuming that this is meant to be a reference to how long it takes for CG movie projects like shrek. This could be completely different for making CG movies for computer games, which are often made on lower budget and may have smaller Render Farms. It should give specific details. Something like "X Company, making Y movie had Z computers in a render farm which took roughly an hour per frame to render"

To say, render a 100x100 frame takes a second, well, to render a cube with only one light and no ray tracing or shadow or whatever else there may be at 1080i would take about one second. Frame size is less of an indicator of rendering speed as to what is getting rendered. (deformations, displacements, particles, clothes, fluids etc) As the article refers to render farms, it should relate to the time it takes to render the stuff they usually render on render farms. On the Simpsons season 7 DVD (to cite a source) the PDI guy said that the rule of thumb should be "rendering time stays constant" it still takes hours to render a frame as it did in the 90s but now a frame has more element to render. Computing power has increased, but also the complexity of the software that runs on them, thus the rendering time stays constant.(PDI is the folks who would now become dreamworks animation who made shrek etc) But then, pixar in one of them press conference cited something like average 8 hours. The average time to render something on a render farm depends on what software is being run. A mental ray rendering a certain frame wouldn't yield an equivalent result as it would if that certain frame is rendered on a PRman. In summary, I thought that phrase needs to be removed and replaced with a more "wikipedia" explanation.''F3-R4'' 22:37, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Did my best to rewrite it but keep the sentiment. Originally, it was two lines long, so I may have lengthened it to be a little to repetitive, feel free to reword the last two sentences a bit. —Wikibarista 16:37, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Example of time

Can someone put examples of some movies and how long it took to render them. Like "Movie X took Y months to render". —Preceding unsigned comment added by Frap (talk • contribs) 18:47, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Too Technical

I have to agree, this article is a bit too technical. It didn't help me better understand what this or how it works at all. Any chance this will be changed in the near future? ——Digital Jedi Master (talk) 05:19, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

And also an incorrect article

Well, lucky you, Digital Jedi Master. You did not absorb the many errors therein. Zero references (except a dictionary item!) of course, and the entire process description is at times outdated and more often incorrect. I may get to fix it one day.... For now I just tagged it to avoid error propagation. History2007 (talk) 14:42, 1 February 2012 (UTC)