Distributive Rendering Community Concept

[J Montreuil 0]

So I came up with an idea yesterday that I thought was pretty novel. It will most likely never happen but if it does, I get credit and 50% of ownership.

 

This is along the lines of 'Folding at Home' or 'SETI at Home' where you can have other people process your data for you ie. render your projects. You can upload pieces or frames to a central server that distributes these to users that have open CPU cycles. You would then get the finished product delivered to you.

 

You would have to have some sort of incentive to get people to donate their CPU time and I came up with a bit torrent like ratio. Time that you donate towards the community gets credited to your account and when you want to have something processed for you, you need to have the credit available to do. Or you have to maintain a certain ratio to be able use people's services.

 

This would require a lot of work though. You would need a community that is available for people to congregate around and upload their projects and set themselves available for processing. Also, you would need support from the product developers themselves in providing cheap or free render licenses to users.

 

This is a little pie in the sky and would require a lot of cooperation from a lot of different facets but it could change the way small studios and freelancers work and the way they interact together.

 

I posted this on my blog http://www.jordanmontreuil.com/test/?p=23 (I wish the guy I work with would finish my site because it looks like crap right now).

[chriskelley 0]

I've done a fair amount of research on distributed rendering systems.

The biggest hurdles are things like:

• Plugins (Using plugin X would require every render client has plugin X installed)

• Plugin Licensing

• Fonts

• Bandwidth (Often the transfer time required for retrieving final renders can be untenable)

• Privacy of files/renders (In the context of community rendering of professional projects)

 

That's just a start. There are plenty of other debugging issues that arise when dealing with a heterogeneous network of machines that you don't have access to.

 

But, it's certainly not impossible. Thinking about it is the first step!

[parallax 0]

This is not a new idea, so i would not get my hopes up on those massive amounts of royalties because you posted it on the interwebs

Chriskelley has some good arguments against this, and in motion graphics the bandwidth argument is especially strong. Plugins etc. good be serversided.

 

Apart from that, i know of little motion graphics projects that are 90 minutes in length.

[vozzz 2]

they are alraedy doing this for blender.

 

i signed up. then realized its only for blender... =P

 

as pointed out, it only ever has the potential to work for something that is free. Otherwise it would be version compatibility hell. And you'd get broken renders most of the time.

 

although they have some fancy system with vmware, which doesnt affect your computer and has all the software pre-loaded.