Network rendering with Backburner

You can use Autodesk^® Backburner^TM with Maya to manage your render jobs and render nodes while network rendering. Autodesk Backburner is a background rendering network system that allows animation scenes to be rendered by many computers working collectively on the same network.

Refer to the Backburner User Guide for more information. (This file is about 2MB in size.)

Installing Backburner

Prior to installing Backburner, ensure that your firewalls on your render nodes are disabled or the proper port is allowed through.

Refer to the chapter Configuring a Standalone Workstation of the Backburner Installation Guide for information on how to set up background rendering on a standalone workstation. (This file is about 2MB in size.)

Refer to the chapter Backburner Components - Windows of the Backburner Installation Guide for instructions on how to set up the Backburner Manager and Backburner Server in a render farm. (This file is about 2MB in size.)

The installation and set up procedure described below can be used out of the box or modified for a custom integration.

Before you begin

Before you begin, you must ensure the following:

Install Backburner and Maya in the same folder location on each of your render farm nodes. Therefore, you cannot mix Windows render nodes with Linux render nodes or Windows render nodes with Mac OS X render nodes and so forth.
Your project must be accessible from all the render nodes in your backburner setup.
- (Windows) Mapped to the same drive letter or UNC Path.
- (Linux) Mounted to the same location.
- (Mac OS X) Mounted to the same location.
You must set your project to the network accessible path.
It is recommended that your project data exists on a separate file server from your render nodes and render farm manager.
Your scene must be saved to file and accessible across the network. All unsaved changes are ignored.
The project ..\images directory to which your rendered images will be saved must be writable across the network.
The log path to which your log files will be saved must be writable.

Note

Backburner gives the best performance improvement for rendering animations. Backburner can only subdivide a job into tasks of at least one frame long. It cannot subdivide a single frame into multiple tasks for distribution across more than one machine.

Network rendering using Maya with Backburner

Follow these steps to set up Backburner for use with Maya.

Setting up Backburner for use with Maya on Windows

Install Backburner and Maya on all your render farm nodes.
You must install Backburner and Maya in the same folder location on each computer.
Select a machine to be used as the render farm manager. On this machine, run the Backburner Manager and configure it to suit your environment.
On all the machines to be used for rendering (including the render farm manager, if desired), run the Backburner Server application and point it to the computer you selected as the Backburner Manager.
Note
You can run the Backburner Manager and Server as a service in Windows. For more information, consult the Backburner Installation Guide.

Note
It is not recommended that the render farm manager be used for rendering.

Setting up Backburner for use with Maya on Linux

Install Backburner and Maya on all your render farm nodes.
You must install Backburner and Maya in the same folder location on each computer.
Select a machine to be used as the render farm manager. On this machine, run as root, /usr/discreet/backburnerConfig and install the Backburner Manager service.
Note
Setting up the Backburner Server service is optional.
On all the machines to be used for rendering (including the render farm manager, if desired), run as root, /usr/discreet/backburnerConfig and configure the Backburner server to point to the computer you selected as the Backburner Manager.
Note
It is not recommended that the render farm manager be used for rendering.

Note
For more information, consult the Backburner Installation Guide.

Setting up Backburner for use with Maya on Mac OS X

Install Backburner and Maya on all your render farm nodes.
You must install Backburner and Maya in the same folder location on each computer.
Select a machine to be used as the render farm manager and enter its name in the manager.host file located at /usr/discreet/backburner/cfg.
Restart the Backburner server.
Alternatively, you can restart your machine.

Note
For more information, consult the Backburner Installation Guide.

Submitting a job to Backburner from Maya

To create your render jobs and manage your render nodes, select Render > Create Backburner Job.

Creating your custom integration

In addition to using the Backburner integration out of the box, you can also customize your own integration. To do so, it is important to understand the following.

When you select Render > Create Backburner Job, this script creates settings that direct the Maya render command line utility and the Backburner cmdJob utility.
The render command utility is instructed to use the current project path and the current scene path for rendering. As well, the render directory is the project images directory.
The Start Frame, End Frame, and Task Size attributes are used to create a task list file used to distribute frames to the different machines. For example if your Start Frame is 1, End Frame is 30, and Task Size is 6, then Backburner uses the file to instruct the render command which frame(s) to render on each render node. For example, render node 1 renders frames 1-6, render node 2 renders frames 7-12 and so forth.
To see how the arguments for both the Maya render command line utility and the Backburner cmdJob utility are generated, select Use Custom Command in the Render > Create Backburner Job window and click the Populate Command button. You can also customize the arguments as you like.