By Christopher Grant · 2010-11-05This is a quick calculator for those of you with backburner render farms. It'll estimate how many frames your computer will render versus how many your idle backburner nodes will in a given amount of time.
For example - say you work at a small studio and have a dozen backburner nodes available. It's Friday afternoon, you want to go home but you're concerned that the new glossy objects increased your frame time to 20 minutes / frame on your workstation. But how many can you render on the farm? This tool will help you. For the type of work I do this tool works well - your mileage may vary.
Note: You have to have backburner already setup and a manager on subnet 255.255.255.0 for this to work. Only idle nodes are used in the estimate.
WARNING: this script isn't magic. It's doing some really simple calculations - all it cares about is the backburner performance index per node, total frame time and total number of hours to render. If you tell it frames take 1 minute but they actually take 1 hour - don't be surprised that it's estimate isn't accurate.
THIS IS ONLY A TOOL FOR QUICK ESTIMATES. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR DEADLINES.
