Visual Basic
SQL
Internet-based rendering solution which used distributed computing to render 22 minutes of full animation for a children’s television show. This render farm, written using Visual Basic and SQL, enabled volunteer computers from around the world to render portions of the show by enabling downloading and uploading with SSH.
I took over this half-baked project from a co-worker when he left the company. It was done in VisualBasic, and so I continued to develop in that language after acquainting myself with the code. Artists would submit jobs to the Queue and volunteer computers around the world would pick up a series of frames to render. Before taking over the project I was involved with optimizing the SQL queries for speed. The basic infrastructure of client requested package delivery via SSH was already developed when I took over. I added render software versioning and branching (32 and 64 bit support), monitoring, reporting and remote controlling the render swarm, automatic updating, automated start and stop times, and status tracking for volunteer ranking (total frames rendered).
Screen shots:
