Bryce lightning on the same PC

sriesch

Crazy question.  Is it possible to run multiple copies of lighting on the same PC to effectively make use of more than 8 cores at once?

Horo

I'm not sure but as I understand lighting, each client needs its own IP address. I once tried to start a virtual PC (XP on Win 7) and on that virtual PC (XP) another virtual one (Win 2000) and got 3 different IP addresses that could be used for network rendering on the same PC. However, each virtual PC only run one core so this wasn't an improvement. I'm not sure how the Mac works for Lightning. I was once told that it uses the Ethernet address, not the IP one.

On the other hand, Network rendering doesn't honour all render options when rendering premium, something I found out once after having spent 4 days network rendering a scene on 2 computers (i7 and i3, both 4 cores) and the result was completely different and not usable, except for deleting.

There is another option. Mostly an idea from c-ram: render "tiles". You can open several instances of Bryce and load the same scene and plop-render different parts on each instance. After c-ram brought up the idea to plop render parts of huge images, I elaborated a bit on the topic and prepared a PDF: https://horo.ch/docs/mine/pdf/Plop-Mask.pdf. Maybe it is of help or inspires you to find another means.

c-ram

Horo : that's the better option. Lightning with premium effects is not able to render the expected results.

 

A friend of mine have got a very powerful xeon computer with 24 cores and I have try to run 3 instances of bryce. And this is of course working : each instances took 8 cores to render a crop, dividing 3 times the calculation.

sriesch

I forgot about that option, good idea.  I'll have to keep it in mind if I ever end up with one of the newer PCs.  Thanks!