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:
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):
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