Setting Up 3DS Max Rendering Farm. Help Please!

[King Icewind]

I have a project I am working on for a contest. The project is tourist attractions in Washington DC. So there's going to be a lot of rendering to be done. Unfortunately I only have a 2 days to render which I am praying and hoping will be enough time. The last project I did was going to take 27 hours to render on my computer in my sig. Anyways I read a couple guides on how to set up a rendering farm and it looks very daunting.

First off,
Do i need to have 3ds Max installed on all the computers for the farm to work? A bit of a nooby questions but...
Do variances in OS's effect rendering?

Processing power seems to be the most important, so I have...
Three P4 2-2.6ghz
Pentium D 2.66
My laptop 2ghz Dual Core Centrino
My computer i7 920 4ghz
I even have four 450mhz P3's i could throw in if they will really help that much.

I only have a 10/100mbps switch to connect these all together. The only way I could get a Gigabit switch is by buying one, so that's not really going to happen.

So any tips, easy guides, and suggestions would be great! Hopefully I don't blow to many breakers in my room.

Thanks.

 

[Elledan]

It is recommended to have the same configuration and OS on each node. A good page to start is probably the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_farm

Autodesk has an article too, but it's from 2005 so I'm not sure how up to date it is: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/item?siteID=123112&id=5581724&linkID=9241177

Good luck

 

[Peteman100]

Another option is to break the animation into segments, render each separately on different computers, then stitch them back together in a program like Adobe Premiere. Just make sure you render each clip in an uncompressed format and then compress the final product, at the end with Premiere.