RenderDrive supports most, but not all of the native Max materials and maps. Understandably, the speed increase was most noticeable on images with lots of raytracing and motion blur.
Renderman vs mental ray software#
RenderDrive was approximately 10 to 20 times faster than the software renderer I had been using. I made a few tweaks to the lights and the image came back looking great.
Renderman vs mental ray manual#
A quick look at the manual made me realize that RenderDrive's lighting model is different from Max's. I took a scene that rendered nicely in 3D Studio Max and sent it to RenderDrive just to see how it would look-it came back black. Moving to RenderDrive from a package's native renderer can prove vexing at first. In this way, RenderDrive is similar to any other third-party rendering program, such as Mental Images' Mental Ray. Instead, it translates the information and renders it using its own renderer, which takes advantage of the custom hardware. It is important to note that RenderDrive does not run these individual renderers natively. It can also render RenderMan RIB files, which must be submitted through a command line interface. RenderPipe maintains the network connection to the RenderDrive and also provides an interface to the rendering software-currently a choice of either Discreet's 3D Studio Max or Alias|Wavefront's Maya. To render an image, the user installs ART's Render Pipe software plug-in into the 3D application at hand.
The RenderDrive produces high-quality images, including ones with reflections. Once the machine is switched on, it reads this file and automatically connects to the appropriate network. This last step is done by saving a text file to a floppy disk that is then placed into the RD3000's drive.
There are basically three steps to setting up the RenderDrive: Plug it into the wall, then into the network, and configure the machine with its IP address. This makes one RenderDrive the equivalent of perhaps a dozen or more PC-based rendering machines. Plugged into one of the PCI slots, however, is the true heart of the RenderDrive-a card containing not one, not two, but 42 custom-designed processors that do nothing but raytrace. The guts of the machine were basically a standard-issue Pentium III motherboard, a 7gb SCSI hard disk, 768mb of RAM, a network card, and the aforementioned floppy drive. With so few frills on the outside of the box, I had to pop the top and look inside. Oh, yes, and a tiny LED on the front to let you know whether the power is on or off. It has two cables-one for power, the other for a 10/100base-T network connection a power switch and a floppy disk drive on the back of the unit. The RD3000 is about as toaster-like as you can get. ART's RenderDrive RD3000, which the company refers to as an "appliance," is designed as a compact and powerful replacement for the multimachine rendering farms common in most mid-range to high-end production facilities. The RenderDrive is a computer that does one thing and one thing well: It renders.
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