Been wondering about this one too - sounds intriguing, but I've never seen or heard of anyone actually using it, and I've never run across a copy.
Probably because Autodesk kind of got it backwards with this one - render nodes should be cheap, common machines bought en masse and networked into an inexpensive farm. That's what studios were doing in the late '90s: the actual 3D modeling & animation was created on expensive SGI workstations with fast 3D hardware, then they farmed out the rendering to cheap beige x86 boxes with little to no graphics capability. Modeling/animating on a PC and then rendering on an SGI was not cost-effective, and anybody who could afford an Indigo2/Onyx could probably also afford a copy of Softimage or Alias to actually utilize that fancy 3D hardware.
Still, I'd love to see a copy of this renderer in action.
Probably because Autodesk kind of got it backwards with this one - render nodes should be cheap, common machines bought en masse and networked into an inexpensive farm. That's what studios were doing in the late '90s: the actual 3D modeling & animation was created on expensive SGI workstations with fast 3D hardware, then they farmed out the rendering to cheap beige x86 boxes with little to no graphics capability. Modeling/animating on a PC and then rendering on an SGI was not cost-effective, and anybody who could afford an Indigo2/Onyx could probably also afford a copy of Softimage or Alias to actually utilize that fancy 3D hardware.
Still, I'd love to see a copy of this renderer in action.
