Rendering : Setting up a renderfarm

[Xilica]

I'm not exactly sure myself, however I have 3ds mmax 4.2 myself and I still have the manuals which come in it. It should explain somewhere in the the manuals.

[halo]

max has unlimited render licenses (or summat daft like 10000)....you install an minimum version of max and use the server manager and client software to control it. Most plugins are licensed to render under these conditions so you shouldnt need to worry about buying dupe plugins.

remember that you can only send out 1 frame to each machine, from what i remember mental ray and vray are the only renderers capable of splitting a frame across a farm, vray comes with 10 machine licenses for this (unlimited if a frame isnt split)...mental ray is licensed per processor :S

[Aaron Moore]

fR also can do bucket rendering... don't know how it handles renderfarms though... might just be for multi-proc

[Chico]

Setting up the render farm is infact very easy, and it should get easier and better with backburner now lurking around in there.

The manuals have very good documentation on how to go about doing it. I have ours set up as services so that I can submit a job to any machine and it automaticly kicks in. This way you dont have to go around each machine and start the server since the service starts it when windows boots.

One thing you do need to bear in mind is if you have the servers running as services on an NT system, you'll need to go into the administrator settings of the control panel and give the Backburner service the admin login (or one that has lots of file sharing settings) so that it can render all the images back to the host machine. Otherwise it will render the frames but can only save it to the local machine and you will have to go around and copy them all back to the drive you need them on.

Its great when its working and I couldnt be without it. But expect to spend you intial day or so simply working out the bugs.

A few notes:
Make sure you clear completed renders from your queue manager as even though they are done, their max file and their maps (if you have told it to send maps) are still stored in your (the computer with the manager) c:/max/backburner/ dir (Also some are stored somewhere else) and it doesnt take long to fill up with a few gig and bring your machine to a halt.

Try to link to you maps like this :
\\MYPC\Resources\bitmap.tga
So that you dont need to "Include maps" when submitting a job for rendering. This way all the servers will simply grab the map off the network rather than having to drag it over from the Manager. This willalso mean faster times for job submitting. I asume when the job is being submitted its saving a temp .max file to the manager with all the materials. Many times Ive found that its saving 100mb files to the manager then sending them across the network to the servers. This can be very slow.

HUmm thats a fair bit of ramble, Ill leave it at that for now.
:) Good luck.

[Null_Object]

I really dont like the setup up of 3dmax's net render system. I am a native of Lightwave and let me tell you Screamer Net and Screamer Net II is godly.

-Null

[Chico]

HUmm, I have to have a shot at setting up a lightwave render farm next week. I havent used screamernet since 5.5 and even then I just took a back seat when it was being set up. Im looking foward to trying the linux renderer for lightwave too :D

[Aaron Moore]

just got the scremer net cds from LW so i'll be installing them on several macs/pcs around the office. Its probably a lot easier to setup and work with then max... I wish max didn't need to init each time... its a bad system... they should complie the renderer into its own app and have the main system handle the distribution of rendering info rather then have each system open up a copy of the file IMO.

[dvornik]

I know how to setup backburner. We've used it before.

Now, we have several dual processor PIIIs available and my boss considers setting up a renderfarm that would work for maya and max, maybe lightwave in the future. Is there a commercial system that would allow manageble centralized rendering for both maya and max? Or a reasonable combination of 2 rendering solutions? We have the money to buy software, but I am new to this and don't know where to start.

We are a school, and the renderfarm would serve our max and maya classes.

[Aaron Moore]

well the software is already there with max ... dunno about maya... nothing commercial in the sense that it needs to work with 3dsmax. If you use a solution like Renderman or what was that raytracer (ray max or soemthing) then they ahve independent software u need to install.

Brazil uses its own rendering engine but still uses the max render engine core i think... dunno depends on your setup and software

[dvornik]

Renderman is something we were considering, but we don't know enogh about it. Will it work with both max and maya? It's website doesn't offer that much information.

[edit] The setup is simple: one classroom is running max, one - maya. There's a bunch of rendering machines in another room (I guess each needs a Maya license). The students submit their jobs from classrooms. I need to be able to control rendering from my office machine.

[ZeBoxx]

Originally posted by Aaron Moore
Brazil uses its own rendering engine but still uses the max render engine core i think...

Just correcting you - it doesn't :)

To get back on-topic, btw... respower are running a 150-machine renderfarm with Brazil r/s installed - you can check them out here : http://www.respower.com/

Though if the base platform is Maya, the requestor may not have much choice besides the Maya renderer, Mental Ray, and Renderman.

Re,
Richard

[Aaron Moore]

err by that i ment that it relied on max still to launch... err doesn't it? Or do the network nodes run purely without max initilizing???

[ZeBoxx]

Heya,

No - you do still need max.. the only way to get around that, is to create an entirely self-sustaining renderer.

The problem with that is that you have to try and export all the shaders max uses, all the volumetrics, etc.

Some try to do that, others try and teach the users to use something like renderman shaders from the get-go.

But as ar as 3dsmax-native renderers go.. they need 3ds max to work :)

-----

For the guy looking to start up a renderfarm... Yeah, you'll most likely want your own netrender jobs management software if you're planning big.
'fraid there isn't really any commercially available solution - proprietary software is generally best.

Otherwise, using whatever comes with the application should work.

I used to keep a list of renderfarms.. Job Roberts took it over for me quite some time ago... should be located here :
http://www.unofficial3d.com/farm.shtml

Might give you some indication of what people may expect from a renderfarm. Ignore the system specs, though - they appear to be outdated (P 166MHz ? eek)

Best regards,
Richard Annema

[Rhid1en]

Thanks everyone! I'm a bit behind schedule as of now to actually get it set up, but hopefully later this week after my big deadline I can work with our IT guy to get it going, unfortunately, he knows nothing about 3d max, so it will mainly be me setting it up.:rolleyes: I really appreciate all the info and suggestions!
Hehe... maybe if this helps out with my rendering times enough, I'll actually even have time to join in the next cg challenge! It's killing me not to get going on the lord of the rings character I sketched out!

[Rhid1en]

been to busy, finally just gettig around to this, but, okay, here's the deal, setting up my rendering farm, just now getting it going after working for a while just off my hard drive. So, originally creating my bitmap paths they're directed straight to my c drive/textures folder. Now that I've set up the rendering machines, I reconfigured my paths in my bitmap path editor to go thru the network and back to my c drive/textures folder, with it shared to the network. I put those paths on the top of my stack above anything that might direct to my hard drive (example:the discreet textures that come with it for tutorials), however when I try to render to the render machine I keep getting a missing textures error looking for the original path to my c drive. I do hope I don't have to go thru each material and redirect them thru to the server and back to my machine to find them! Does anyone know a way to take care of this problem?!...sorry if my question is a little convoluted, I'm confused! :surprised

[Signal2Noise]

Not app specific but good information none the less. Topic started by yours truly:)

Render farms (http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=46236&highlight=render+farm)


Also do a search, there's lots of good info here at CgT on this very subject.

[lightwell]

Probably a pain now but you can avoid the missing map thing in future by sticking all your jobs, maps, etc in shared folders and then mapping these as network drives.

You can also do distributed rendering Using Max 5 .1 and Backburner if you have installed the design extension that became available as part of the subscription program. Haven't used it for a deadline yet but have been running tests over the past couple of weeks in anticipation and it seems to work a treat.

...a week later and I have encountered a couple of problems.
- sometimes Max is not able to join the sections.
- somethimes different image sizes and slice configurations seem to crash the region render facility

[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.