Some of you will already know this but for those of you with multi-core machines and needing to squeeze the best performance out of it, this may help.
Install Qmaster from the Shake installer disc
In system prefs, choose Qmaster and configure the following:
QuickCluster with services
check rendering with share and managed (Compressor is for Final Cut stuff or general encoding tasks so you can turn that off if you don’t use it)
Hit options to set the number of instances - generally choose the number of cores in your machine.
In advanced, choose show Qmaster in menu bar
It doesn’t seem to like odd characters in your computer name like if you had your computer name set to Jim’s Mac Pro, it doesn’t seem to like the apostrophe - you can rename this in your system prefs > sharing panel by just editing the text field at the top and hit return
Finally, hit start sharing in the Qmaster system prefs.
The menu bar icon looks like this on the left:
Now to enable support in Shake, go into a .h file in your ~/nreal/include/startup - just put one there if you don’t have a preferences file and inside it, type:
sys.useRenderQueue = “Qmaster”;
save the file.
Relaunch Shake to read the startup preference and open a project or create a test project with a fileout node. You should see a new option at the bottom of the render fileout nodes dialog called render queue. Open this up and you will see a set of options. Check the useQueue option and click Batch Monitor to see your render queue - it doesn’t open automatically.
(^ looks like CGTalk’s background is the same color as Shake)
Now if you set your frame range and hit render, you should see a process added to your batch monitor and it will have split your render into multiple segments and they will start to render in parallel.
I wish I’d known this before I started rendering a 65,000 frame film and left it overnight to see it had stuck at 10,000. Also, don’t ever render using a movie format when you do this, PNG image sequences are much more reliable. They are pretty hard to manage in the filesystem though and much more trouble putting them into Final Cut.
Anyway, Qmaster rendering benefits even dual core machines. I was able to reduce render times by 20% on a dual core machine. Quad-core and octo-core should see the biggest improvement.
It seems odd that there is an improvement because you often see Shake using all the CPUs anyway but I guess fewer CPUs working on more images in parallel is faster than all CPUs working on one frame at a time - you can experiment with the number of qmaster instances to see what gives you the best performance. You probably won’t benefit much going above the number of cores you’ve got but sometimes even say 5 instances on a 4-core can improve things.
Oh yeah and if you do use Compressor, you can increase the instances too but the options can be greyed out. To do this, type in a terminal:
qmasterprefs -list
This will show you current services. Then you can use:
qmasterprefs -service “Compressor Processing” on instances 4 autorestart off unmanaged on
and it will set the number of instances that way.
