Network rendering

[Mylenium]

Hi people,
This is my first thread here so be nice...

I'm looking into setting up a small render farm for After Effects and Maya. I wonder if you guys know any good render managment tools? I've played around some with Muster but I'd like to test some other managment tools before I pay $899.

If you need both AE and Maya support, Muster is actually your only choice. Not that there are no other tools for Maya, but nobody cares much about AE in this respect.

Mylenium

[slawes]

I'm a big fan of Rush. It's multy platform and can manage your Maya and ae jobs simultaneously.
We used it on 'Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow' in the Compositing dept. with 26 mac artist stations and a 40 proc pc render farm. Worked flawlessly.
Greg Ercolano is a great guy to deal with as well.

Link - http://seriss.com/rush/

Stephen.

[gui_P]

I tried muster too with AE and XSI..... I hope you've a very fast network.
muster is very slow with AE, spend more time to look if frames are calculated than it takes to actually calculate the frames.... looses the connection... doesn't calculate all the frames.... it's up to 5 times faster to calculate with the collect file and watch folder option directly in AE. it's the same with XSI, never try with Maya...

for me Muster was not a good experience.

[beaker]

If you need both AE and Maya support, Muster is actually your only choice. Not that there are no other tools for Maya, but nobody cares much about AE in this respect.

MyleniumNo, there are atleast 5-6 others that support both maya and AE. Smedge, RenderPal, Rush, Deadline, and many others I just can't think of right this second.

http://software.franticfilms.com/
http://seriss.com/rush/
http://www.uberware.net/
http://www.renderpal.com/

Personally, I agree with slawes, Rush is the best of them all, especially for a large farm and something you want to script into your pipeline. Also it runs on just about every platform out there.

[marnold]

I am in the market for a network render for AE and Max - but I heard Rush adds 20-40s delay to the start of each frame for 3dstudio renders? Can anyone counter that rumor - it would be a deal breaker.

It seems anything would be an improvement over the AE network renderer that comes with the Pro version. The whole watch folder and interface seem antiquated and unreliable at best. When I shared the 3dStudio/backburner network render interface with the after effects guys they were quite jealous.

Now I need something that will handle both packages - allow me to set priorities, etc.

any recommendations?

[beaker]

I'm setting up our renderfarm with Rush this week and this is the first time I am using it with AE (previously only with shake and maya). So Ill let you know.

There are concerns though from reading this document:
http://seriss.com/rush-current/issues-afterfx-6.5/

[noxy]

We have been using Rush with Maya for a while, but while trying to set it up for After Effects, we found that Rush required a full install of After Effects on each machine rather than a render only version. Our sysadmin thought that this was not legal per Adobe's licensing. Does anyone know of any legal ways to get an After Effects farm working with Rush without buying a full copy for each node?

Thanks

Noxy

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.