I installed 6.1.175 Apprentice NC on one Windows2000 box and another on a WindowsNT4 (SP6) box.

I am able to render on both independently.

I have created a simple animation which only uses VEX for shading and (I am new to VEX) is rather slow. So I thought since I have two machine, I'll try network rendering.

I when to the ROP and added both machine names in the mantra field such that it looks like ‘mantra -H “temasek, merlion”’.

When I render the image, it does not startup mantra on the other machine.

I do have firewall (Kerio Personal Firewall) on each machine, could that be the problem?

Does anyone know if mantra (NonCommercial) works in network rendering mode?

Three things come to mind:

1. If what you typed in the ROP is the same as what you typed in your forum message, there's a mistake: there should be no space after the comma!

2. I don't know about Houdini NC - multi-CPU rendering might be disabled. If it's enabled, then point no.1 applies.

3. Networking on Windows is a pain in the behind - if someone has a *reliable* way of avoiding such pitfalls as unseen textures or unrecognised remote volumes I'd love to hear it! As for me, I'm probably going to move over to Linux…

Hope this helps,
Roy Stelzer
Stelzer Productions
Switzerland

as you suspected, network rendering is disabled in the non-commercial version.