Network Rendering Rocks in 5

[Aaron Moore]

Glad to hear its nice and stable... I have 3 machines here (should have a new one in a few weeks) and I've been looking forward to setting them up. This is definatly good to hear... although I still think its a pain to install everything on each machine...

It would be nice to have an installer which you could package yourself with the plugins and everything and then just burn an installer cd.

[nebba]

You’re right, it took me 5 hours yesterday to setup 20 computers with an install of MAX 5, plugins, and all the boot up configurations that are need.
I wonder if you could build an installer that would have all the pluggins. I have guys at my office who have built custom installers for other CAD programs and they even setup a disk image that can be cloned across multimple other computers. And I bet you could install a command line script that would synchronize all the computer to match the host. I should look in to that. Thanks.

[BrandonD]

I've worked with Lightwave, Maya and Houdini in production as well, and NONE of them ship with network rendering management tools that come even close to what Discreet has done, especially regarding Backburner. Don't take it for granted ;)

Still it's unfortunately missing a vital ingredient - launching renders from the command line. Without that, it's next to impossible to include MAX in a unified pipeline. So yes, it kicks ass in a MAX only environment...

[Aaron Moore]

I've looked into trying to package it myself, but theres a lot of files there and it would be a LOT of work figuring out what goes where (especially in the registry and what not)...

Also brandon makes a good point about the lack of command line based rendering.

It seems like submitting a job shouldn't require a open max window especially since the job is recieved via a a command from max...

[nebba]

Maybe we should put it in the MAX 6 wish list. It would be so nice to run Radiosity Solutions without load the MAX interface, and then send them to the Render Manger...oh Discreet I hope you're listening.

[ostov]

What does/is the network rendering??


ostov

[Aaron Moore]

Originally posted by ostov
What does/is the network rendering??


ostov

ITs just having a bunch of computers render your animations ...



What would be nice is if you could setup the max render to network render with buckets so that a single machine could easily "dispatch" a quick test frame and get the network craking away!

[3dsmax5]

In the design extension for max, there's a region net render script. It renders in buckets over the network. :p

[Aaron Moore]

Originally posted by 3dsmax5
In the design extension for max, there's a region net render script. It renders in buckets over the network. :p

where?

[gaggle]

There's a Network Installation option thing that sounds interesting, on the MAX5 CD.

Now, I'm not talking about the thing where you install as usual and is given the option of Full Install, Network Install, or Minimal Install, or whatever the three options are called.

Right in the Autostart that runs when the CD is plopped into the drive, there's a small icon, left-most 2nd from the buttom I think, that I seem to remember going "oh.. hhmmm!" over a few days back. I was in too much of a hurry to bother checking it out, but it sounded like it was some sort of network-"Thing", intended for spreading MAX to an entire network. Maybe some floating-network-license scheme as well?

Ah idunno, someone more technical-minded and with more spare-time can check it out and report back hopefully :)

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