MangaFairy - 20 June 2012 04:48 PM
It sure would be nice if there was a “render farm” app that ran independent of DAZ and I’m not talking about the Renderman at Pixar.
Also, can you close the main app window and it will still render in the background?
I can’t talk to your animation render status, as I’ve never done it in Studio/3Delight. (I do pretty much all my renders with Studio->Reality->LuxRender.)
But I can tell you that Studio does not let you render in the background from within Studio itself. I suspect this is a licensing issue with the 3Delight render engine, since the folks that make 3Delight also sell it as a stand-alone renderer. You can use the stand-alone version to render scenes outside of Studio, and it also supports network rendering. However, the stand-alone 3Delight is extremely expensive; it is marketed towards professional studios working on commercial projects rather than 3D enthusiasts. You need a license for each machine you wish to render on, and the license cost is also dependent on the number of CPU cores in each machine. There is a free version as well, but it is limited to a single machine with only two cores, so is quite limited considering modern hardware.
LuxRender supports render farms with no additional fee, given that it is an open-source project. However, LuxRender will introduce other issues for you if you were to try switching to it. Materials are handled differently in Lux than in Studio, requiring conversion that, while not hard to do, has a learning curve to get good at. And Lux, being a true unbiased raytracer, is also much slower at rendering than 3Delight. The trade-off is that Lux generally produces better (meaning more realistic) results. (You can make exceptionally realistic renders in 3Delight, but it requires a lot more work to set up than it does in Lux.)
