Hello I'm a tech from a school and we currently teach Houdini. Right now there's going to be stronger intakes and which means that there's going to be less machines for students to render on. We are new to the render farm environment and seeking some advice. We're proposing to have an environment of mac mini's, the core 2 duo's with 2gb's of ram. The render software we're thinking of using is Rush www.seriss.com/rush, as it supports autodesk, softimage, renderman and houdini. Any thoughts??

What OS you running? Houdini doesn't run on OSX. I know there's ways to install other OS's on Mac hardware nowadays, but I'm not up on it. One of the bigger stumbling blocks is that OGL support on Macs falls behind the other platforms.

I've heard Rush is pretty good for the bucks. We use Sun Grid Engine here, but in your scenario, to get up and running with the least headaches(and writing the least number of wrappers ), sounds like, apart from OSX, that should do the trick.

Cheers,

J.C.

P.S. If the Mac thing becomes an issue and you're going mini for the costs, then you should look at regular intel render nodes. It's cheap.

JColdrick
What OS you running? Houdini doesn't run on OSX. I know there's ways to install other OS's on Mac hardware nowadays, but I'm not up on it. One of the bigger stumbling blocks is that OGL support on Macs falls behind the other platforms.

I've heard Rush is pretty good for the bucks. We use Sun Grid Engine here, but in your scenario, to get up and running with the least headaches(and writing the least number of wrappers ), sounds like, apart from OSX, that should do the trick.

Cheers,

J.C.

P.S. If the Mac thing becomes an issue and you're going mini for the costs, then you should look at regular intel render nodes. It's cheap.

hey, thanks for the reply. We're not actually running houdini on the mini's but just using the nodes to be sent to the farm to render. unless houdini needs to be on each of the mac mini's on the farm to render. but then that's where Rush comes in to manage the renders.

:?: You lost me. Rush just shuttles tasks around and helps manage them. If you want a houdini(mantra) render to happen on a render node, then mantra will need to actually run on that node, i.e. not in this case with Macs.

Cheers,

J.C.