Is it worth it?
Exitof
Posts: 53
https://www.daz3d.com/grid-for-carrara
Speed Up Your Workflow With A Grid Render Farm
You've done the work. It's inspired, inventive and ingenious. Now comes the most tedious part of the process - rendering. Click the button and walk away while your computer turns your visions into reality. But what if there was a way to see those results faster, without the downtime on your creative workstation?
With GridTM, you can eliminate all that creative downtime by taking advantage of the power of network rendering. The Grid site license enables you to build a render farm of up to 50 nodes with up to 100 CPU's, freeing you to continue working on your next piece while the tedious rendering is handled seamlessly in the background. What's more, this render farm can be utilized by every Carrara Pro seat in your office, so all of your creative workstations can remain productive.
The Grid license is priced to fit within every creative team's budget and runs on standard off-the-shelf computers, so you can easily add this powerful tool without breaking the bank.
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Comments
TLDR: Buyer Beware.
That was released in 2006. I'm not a Carrara user, but I'd be pretty skeptical about this. This doesn't sound like a cloud computing solution. I think you have to build this grid out of your own stash of computers in your facility. The product readme has basically no information. It doesn't even say what operating system it runs on. Is it Windows? What version? Windows Vista was released in 2006. Does it work on Windows 11? Maybe it is not even for Windows. Maybe it is not even for PC. It only says "off-the-shelf computers". Does the licensing company even still exist?
Well it's certainly at a good sale price atm. AFAIK if you buy it and within 30 days can figure out whether or not it's worth it for you ... you can ask for a refund if you decide no. Worse case scenario the answer is no, so then the bigger question is whether or not you want to gamble.
There may be some Carrara users over in the Carrara forum who could answer your questions. [they do not all come into the Commons]
The sku number is 4446
The currently released products have skus over 100,000
This is a really old product.
It is not cloud. "The Grid site license enables you to build a render farm of up to 50 nodes with up to 100 CPU's," I would not really expect compatibility with current computers.
Bryce has Lightning, a network rendering tool, since version 5 (2001) and it had some enhancements up to version 7.1. I only have 6 computers in my home network and I can use them all (1 Win 2000, 1 Win XP, 2 Win 7 and 2 Win 10) to render a scene. Lightning (the name means lighting speed which is a bit of an exaggeration) is below 3 MB in size and does not need an installation, just copy the file to a computer, neither is Bryce needed. From the computer running Bryce (PC or Mac) the running Lightnings on the other computers in the network can be accessed and used to participate in the rendering (animation or still).
I bought Grid once when it was on sale for a very low price, but I've never tried it. Here's a screenshot of the installers available (not sure why it says DAZ Studio, maybe a typo?).
When this was released, a high-end computer would have been a spanking-new two-core processor, an unheard-of 4gb of RAM since 64-bit operating systems were barely a thing, and a GPU with 512MB of VRAM. Your current computer literally is better than the network you could build with this.
Why would that matter? I don't see any reason to believe it would throttle performance to what was then common, though I can't say whether or how well it works on modern systems.
It is amazing how far technology has come. With all of the computing power enabled by this software, it may soon be possible to perform an entire floating point operation per second. Maybe two if you have a math coprocessor. I intend to upload an article about this subject on my Geocities page as soon as the telephone line becomes available.
You must own one of those fancy 300 baud acoustic couplers. Lucky you!
One of us is not understanding the other. I was saying that this program would be moot, considering current computers have faster processing power and better memory capacity than an old network. As in the problem that this program solved no longer exists, unless you're still working on a Core 2 Duo.
It seems like you're both right. If the software does run on modern hardware then it might still serve its intended purpose. It's also possible that modern computers are so capable that most people wouldn't need a cluster of them for Carrara. Now excuse me while I use my Soundblaster card to produce waveform audio one could never get from the built in PC speaker.
That surely depends on how ambitious the user is - renders are pretty much never fast enough.