A 3Delight Collective allows you to render a single image, including in IPR, faster by using several computers from your network. It is selected through the 3Delight Preferences (in the sidebar of 3Delight Display) or, when rendering using renderdl, though a command line option.
For the 3Delight Collective option to be available, it must first be setup. There are three steps that needs to be done, typically by the person responsible to installing 3Delight:
- Make a JSON file to list the computers/servers to be included in one or more collectives;
- Inform 3Delight of the location of that file through the 3delight.config;
- Run small "service" program (or daemon in Linux) on each computer that is part of the collectives.
Defining the Collective through a simple JSON file
It is only a matter of listing one or more group of computers/servers and associating them with name(s). Here is an example of 5 collectives that can be defined in a hypothetical production facility:
Rack-1 — The servers located in rack number 1.
Rack-2 — The servers located in rack number 2.
Lighter-A — A group of servers you want to dedicate to lighter A.
Lighter-B — A group of servers you want to dedicate fo lighter B.
All-servers — All the servers.
Assuming a facility with 10 servers, named server01 to server10, here is how to build such a file for the above 5 collectives example:
{"Rack-1" : [ "server01", "server02", "server03", "server04", "server05" ],"Rack-2" : [ "server06", "server07", "server08", "server09", "server10" ],"Lighter-A" : [ "server01,16", "server02,16", "server03,16" ],"Lighter-B" : [ "server04,16", "server05,16", "server06,16" ],"All-servers" : [ "server01", "server02", "server03", "server04", "server05", "server06", "server07", "server08", "server09", "server10" ]} |
Equipped with this file, which can be named and saved wherever you choose among your installation, all you have to do is add the following line in the 3delight.config configuration file so that 3Delight know about it:
collective ~/projects/MyCollective.json
With this information, the 3Delight Collective option will be available among the 3Delight Preferences and accompanied with a menu to select which collective to use (if there are more than one):
Running the collective service program
A lightweight "service" program (or daemon in Linux) need to be installed on each machine that is part of a collective. For that, run the following command:
On Windows:
C:\> collective -installservice
On macOS:
% mv /Applications/3Delight/com.3delight.collective.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ ← to launch the licence server when the current user logs in
% sudo mv /Applications/3Delight/com.3delight.collective.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/ ← to launch the license server when the system is started.
On Linux: ...
Additional Notes
- A server/computer can be part of one or more collectives. As is the case in the example above ("server01" is part of 3 out of the 5 collectives).
- With each server/computer name, you can specify a number of cores, eg. "server01,16". This limits the number of cores that will be used when rendering using this computer by invoking the collective it is part of. If the number is not specified, eg. "server01", then all the cores will be used.