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Managing Maya network rendering
Maya network rendering
Network render with the render command line utility
Network rendering with
Backburner
You can now use Autodesk® BackburnerTM 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.
For more information
regarding Backburner installation, see
Installation and Licensing.
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 and vice
versa.
- Your project must be accessible from
all the render nodes in your backburner setup.
- (Windows) Mapped to the same driver letter
or UNC Path.
- (Linux) Mounted to the same location.
- You must set your project to the network
accessible path.
- 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.
NoteBackburner 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.
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.
NoteSetting up the Backburner Server service
is optional.
- On all the machines to be used for rendering,
run as root, /usr/discreet/backburnerConfig and
configure the server node to point to the computer you selected
as the Backburner Manager.
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.