Bfarm makes Distributed Rendering over the Internet possible using Blender and a FTP server.
Bfarm is written in Visual BASIC by Donovan Venuto.


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You must run a seperate FTP server.
The clients will download the .blend file and upload the .tga files to the FTP server.

Bfarm has some requirements about direcories.

Your FTP server must have /output/ directory.  I'm using GuildFTPD where c:\ftproot\ is the root directory.  So my output directory is c:\ftproot\output\
At the end your FTP servers /output/ directory will contain a sequence of .tga files.  


Blender must be installed on all clients to ...

C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\blender.exe


In your .blend file you must set your output direcotry as ...
/bfarm/temp/

This is where the Bfarm client will watch for incoming files.  That's how Bfarm knows that Blender is done.


The bfarm client will automatically make the following directories...

c:\bfarm   
c:\bfarm\temp    
c:\bfarm\blend

The Bfarm client downloads the .blend file from the server then stores it in c:\bfarm\blend\.  These files never get deleted so you may want to monitor what files are in there.  You can usually delete any .blend file because the client will always download the file again when starting a new job.



ERROR MESSAGES...
Bfarm is written in VB6 so you'll need the Visual BASIC runtimes.
If you get an error message saying that you're missing a .dll or .ocx file then you'll need to make sure that the VB runtimes are installed.  If you get errors with the name of a function like ... ExitCleanup() or Wait4Blender() then there's a problem with my code.



I think, at its present state, Bfarm is very limited, but it currently meets my requirements so I'm giving it away in the spirit that others can benefit and possibly further develop it.  If you do further develop Bfarm,  or if you implement a similar program in another language, I would very much like to know about it.

homepage

http://www.geocities.com/tronovan3d

tronovan3d@yahoo.com