Carrara network rendering and MacIntel

[gezer]

Hello all,
I've 4 Macs running OS X, networked, 3 of them as rendering nodes.
Network rendering works great.
I intend to buy an Intel Mac in the near future.
My question is, can it be combined with the rest of my Mac as a rendering host?
Has anyone had any experience in combining Intel and G4/G5 Macs, running OS X for network rendering?

[markbremmer]

It can but there currently some issues with GI. I'm sure it's being worked on but Intel and PowerPC calculate it a little differently and it shows in the final render with a slight tiling in the shadow areas.

So, the options are to fake GI (which is done a lot in the pro world simply because it renders faster anyhow) or turn off the Intel node while rendering.

Mark

[gezer]

Thank you for the answer Mark.
By faking GI, do you mean "Ambient Occlusion"?

[markbremmer]

No. The symptoms show up with AO also. Faking GI involves creating groups of lights to mimic the bounced light. Distance, fall-off and color need to have attention paid to them but it actually goes pretty quickly.

Even on my farm here, for longer animation segments, it actually saves time spending a couple of hours creating lighting rigs v.s. having a render go on for 18+ hours.

I wish an enterprising busines would do for Carrara what it did for Vue6 Infinite. That is, to create a for-hire render farm where you can send your work to be rendered. That's a life saver on tight deadlines. Maybe as Carrara keeps creeping into production environments and gets more widely adopted, it might happen...

Mark

[mayito7777]

That is an excellent idea Mark