Under the load of an unfamiliar electric supply the sad yet somewhat expected demise of a special workhorse computer several weeks back triggered cascading problems that resulted in necessary overhauls of all my computers and network.
What should have been a smooth unpack-setup-plugin-poweron event turned into a hair pulling fiasco.
Ok, so this is the Deadline interface, the Monitor part. After almost 30 years Autodesk’s Backburner has shit the bed. And after trying too long to make it to work in Windows 11, I’m checking out Deadline. It’s 20+ years old now and I’ve only used it a couple times at the Adler Planetarium where they use it for managing their render farm. Someone online described the installation of the Deadline toolkit as dicey and it pretty much was exactly that. I hope Autodesk eventually gives Backburner the love it deserves. But, still a sincere Thank You to Mr. Bezos. Deadline is pretty sweet. And free now.
Deadline calculates 265.8 GHz of CPU rendering power on the farm. Not much compared to cloud rentals, of course, but a fairly vulgar amount for a home situation…as I am often reminded :/
I looked a while back so it’s probably about 5 bucks or so now per hour per machine to render something with the same amount of computing power I have. Some of these animations would cost a few to several hundred dollars to have rendered in the cloud in the same amount of time as my farm.
There was a larger point to this post and if I ever remember what it was I’ll update it.