DISCLAIMER: This is a continuing series detailing the painful story of a DIY render farm build. It is terribly technical and
somewhat frustrating. Those who are unprepared for such “entertainment” are advised to ignore these posts.
Lest these posts become a festival of fails, I’d like to provide at least a little counter with a success or two.
I did manage to write a custom job script for Mandelbulber and Dr. Queue. It had a few bugs, but went through fine. Mandelbulber runs several instances, one per core, which means 8 on the PDC JHVH-1 machine and 4 on Wormwood, the only node connected thus far. Each frame was a proper 4K (4096 x 2160 DCI compliant) render. It took a few hours, but the first 100 frames came through fine.
Imported into DaVinci and made into a 1080 proxy the whole thing worked fine and demonstrates that 4K cinema sized 3D fractals are only a button push away.
If I can confirm the AEFX render and the Luxrender capability I’l be very happy to run the whole farm like that as long as the electricity holds out. I may just run a few thousand frames of this beast for a while as it is so I can get something happening.
