aurafx Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 Just curious.. I got a dual 1.4 gig win2k system. Any one know how to take advantage of my second proc using aprentice? So far only the compositor uses both. Thanks. aurafx@aol.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stremik Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 As far as I know there is no special procedure to make Houdini take advantage of two processors. Houdini does it on it's own. Still. You will not see any significant prformance when you model, rigging, etc. Most likely only one processor will be utilized at the time. Rendering! That's when your second processor will come in handy. I've never done this before(never owned dual proc system) but you'll have to type in somewhere, something like this host1, host2 to make Houdini use two processors. Perhaps other people here can help you with this one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aurafx Posted March 21, 2003 Author Share Posted March 21, 2003 yeah Im not so worried about work flow mostly rendering. What I have been doing that makes me ask this. .is volumetic smoke and writing out .i3d files.. and then rending. takes a while and the mantra only uses one proc. Need all the horse power I can get. Yeah I think I know where it is. you go into you mantra settings to be dual proc rendering and say Local host, Local host, The set your bucket size to like 64 or 128, but every time I do this it crashes... and doesnt recover. may be a bug. Thanks for the response.. it better than I got at SESI's site. Which was no answer over 3 days. aurafx Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cs00bren Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 i think you can render using both processor. in the mantra option you should find something that say "off the top off my head" XXX localHost. it's in the settings for network render. all you have to do is write localHost twice. e.g LocalHost,LocalHost. this will send the mantra twice to your computer thus forcing it to use both cpu. i think this should work bren Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marc Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 Could you let us know what your render command looks like? It could be something in there thats making it crash. It should still never crash though, so there's definitely a bug. But perhaps we can get two procs going for you some other way Cheers Marc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aurafx Posted March 21, 2003 Author Share Posted March 21, 2003 Ok well it might be that Im using aprentice. My render script is this: mantra -H localhost,localhost -B 64 Does that mean any thing. Here is the sequence of events. make the script mod.. the rener only a single frame. It looks like it is working.... larger chuncks rendering faster... then craps out at about 75% screen space... and kills aprentice. So Then I have to restart to get the lic serever to work again. what do you guys think? aurafx Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
old school Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 To answer the very first question, is houdini multi-threaded. Some parts are, some aren't. Rendering is multi-threaded if you use the -H option and yes, you got it right: mantra -H localhost,localhost The -B set to 64 which is just fine as the render tiles will be 64x64. If your render gets in to swap, this is the very first thing to shrink fyi. I generally shrink in the standard binary multiples: 512, 256, 128, 64, 32, 16. 16 is as low as I go whereas 512 is huge and only used if you are rendering simple scenes with lots of system memory. The ui is threaded (interrupts work) but OP evaluation ("cooking") is not. All vex operators (vex SOPs, COPs, CHOPs, POPs) are threaded and use the MMX extensions if you have an intel processor for Windows and Linux. Halo is threaded with many user controls. Now what you are running in to is that the i3d output driver is not threaded. When you generate the i3d data file, this is using a single processor and sounds like this is what you are running in to. This is your bottleneck. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
old school Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 By the way, Apprentice IS Houdini but just a tiny bit crippled so you are working with the real deal. I think that this is just fantastic! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aurafx Posted March 21, 2003 Author Share Posted March 21, 2003 The script is exactly the same. .but I crash. I am running a dual athlon system with a gig of ram. Every time.. I set it to mantra -H localhost,localhost The cpu go for about 20 seconds then stop and then a software crash. Crash so complete Houdini will no restart unless I restart the comp and resync the lic server. oh well I guess Im a single proc man till I get a real version of houdini. aurafx Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mcronin Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 I asked about distributed rendering in Apprentice, and Peter Bowmar said it is not enabled in Apprentice licenses. I assume that goes for SMP as well since the process to set up a distributed render is the same. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 but if it's disabled in Apprentice then it shouldn't work at all... aurafx > are you using 6.0.xxx? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolfwood Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 I'm think the apprentice license only provides one Mantra rendering token. At least thats what I thought. jim. [EDIT] I thought wrong. You can have more than one mantra process. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aurafx Posted March 24, 2003 Author Share Posted March 24, 2003 I just up graded to v6.00 so.. If Iread these posts right.. Aprentice is not multi threaded because Houdidni Aprentice has a few cliped items. Ok.. well Now Iget it. But just so you know.. v5.2 are NOT forward compatible. 5.2 files will not work in v6 houdini aprentice. Doesnt that just suck. aurafx Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 5.2? Was that a build of houdini 5.0? What specifically doesn't work? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolfwood Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 Apprentice IS multi threaded, for exampe COPs takes advantage of multiple CPUs. McCronin said: I asked about distributed rendering in Apprentice, and Peter Bowmar said it is not enabled in Apprentice licenses. Which means you can't do a mantra -H local,local. However you can launch two seperate mantra processes. So if you start two different mantra renders each one will be on a different processor. jim. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aurafx Posted March 24, 2003 Author Share Posted March 24, 2003 thanks for looking in to that. good to know me and my machine arent crazy. well mostly sane. aurafx Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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