Blender, Xgrid, and Other Platforms

[blenderxgrid]

I've been working in my spare time on creating a distrubted computer system based on Xgrid to render Blender 3D projects. It works well on my local LAN, but in the last week I've started to expand it to allow others to connect. So far the Grid has 10.6 Ghz registered to it via internet users.

Blender 3D is Opensource and supported on many platforms including Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux, OSX, and Windows. The major draw back is thus far only macintosh users have been able to connect and process jobs.

I've tried using windows boxes connecting through an opensource JAVA client and then do connect to the grid and accept tasks, but output an error stating "Blender could not be found at current location" or something to that effect. Basically I figure that blender has to be in the same place on all the machines.

I haven't gotten any Linux/BSD users to try the system yet, but there were some sucesses on local grids with Linux machines connenting and rendering works.

Help and advice are sorely welcome. You can check out www.blenderxgrid.com for more information.

So far, I've gotten users to connect to the grid, but the controller is not distrubting out tasks to those agents. They are just shown as "unavailable". And am advancing beyond my technical expertise here, so help and ideas will be welcome.

 

[robbieduncan]

Sounds like a very cool project. Well done on getting this far.

Without seeing the code or even using it my gut feeling would be that there is an issue with how you are specifying your path to the executable in your XGrid job/task. In Unixes (OSX, Solaris, BSD and for the purposes of discussion Linux) file locations are specified relative to the root of the filesystem or relative to the local path. If specified from the root the path starts /. This will not work on Windows where the path must start with the drive letter C:\. Even relative paths are an issue as Unixes use / for a directory separator and Windows uses \!

I imagine this is the root cause of your "Blender could not be found at current location" error.