Rendering and Compositing - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 319

As soon as you hit Enter on that last command, the job is submitted to the farm, and the master node begins
handing out frames in succession to any available slaves. Figure 15.70 shows the Farmerjoe web interface
with a little more going on this time.
Figure 15.70 Farmerjoe handling a number of jobs
WARNING
While using several different OSs and hardware platforms within a render farm can really
make the most of your available resources, it may also cause problems. Most elements within
Blender's renderer work identically across the different technologies, but the new strand render-
ing technology is not guaranteed to work cross-platform. While some simple strand confi gu-
rations will work, anything involving the Kink/Branch options can produce drastically different
(though individually acceptable) results. An animation compiled from frames produced on dif-
ferent platforms can appear as though any strand items are “alive” as they move around from
frame to frame. If in doubt, render the same frame of your animation on several different com-
puters and compare them. If they are not identical, you will have to restrict your rendering only
to nodes that matched.
Slave nodes can be paused and resumed with the buttons on the right of the web interface. Likewise, jobs can
be paused, reset, or completely deleted with the buttons to their right. Clicking on any job in the Jobs list
shows a more detailed accounting of its activity in the Tasks section.