"Antique" Computers Resurrected As Rendering Farm?

Posted by Cliff on Monday October 2, 2000 @11:39AM from the it's-alive!-it's-alive! dept.

Dynedain asks: "Let's suppose that an architecture fraternity suddenly has the opportunity of obtaining a handful or two of old SGI Indigos for little or no cost. What do they do with them? Obvious answer: set up a render farm for their digital projects. Now the question is HOW? We have the ability to network these machines (via TCP/IP on a 10bT network) and a few of us have experience w/ UNIX flavors. We've even been playing with Blender, but it seems to lack network rendering support. Considering we are relative newbies, the limitations of the Indigo (1Gb HD, 96 MB RAM, IRIX 5.3), and the fact that we have no money to spend on licensing, what solutions are available for implementing a 3D render farm with DXF support? Do we cluster? Or do we run network scripts?"

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Do it for the sheer fun, not the performance by shrike · 2000-10-02 06:54 · Score: 5

Hi

Those Indigos, while nice, aren't exactly real performers anymore (especially if they've still got R3000 CPUs). A modern day CPU, such as an AMD Athlon, will run circles around a bunch of those SGI boxes. If you want performance, buy an AMD Duron or even a Thunderbird. A Pentium III would do nicely too.

However, if you're into this kind of stuff (clusters, etc), this is going to be a lot of fun!

You could use a free raytracer, such as POVray or BMRT, which should give you excellent quality output. You should still be able to find IRIX 5.3 binaries of both programs.
You'll need to use some other program to convert your CAD files to one of the formats supported by these raytraces. There are several programs that can do this.