November 25, 2014 Workshop 19 Notes

BACKBURNER RENDER FARM

This workshop takes advantage of a render farm that is located in the server room within the School of Architecture. In order to batch render your Maya animation file, you will need to set your project window location in Maya to a folder on the internal server named "Scantemp", and save your scene file to it.  The BackBurner render farm utility for  Maya  provides  full  distributed  network  rendering  for full  animation jobs in  Maya.    This  is  a  full  offline  render  queue  sending  the  job  across  the  network  to  render  on  the  farm,  and  freeing  the  local  computer  to  continue  working or  log  off. Network  Rendering  is  available  for  all  standard  Maya  renderers,  including  Maya  Software,  Hardware,  Vector,  and  Mental  Ray. 

To  setup  access  from  a  SARC  workstation  or  your  laptop  computer,  you  need  only  have  Maya  and  the   BackBurner  utility  installed.  (Backburner  is  installed  when  you  install  Maya  if  you  check  the  checkbox  to   include  it  when  installing).

Once  you  have  it  installed,  you  can  use  it  directly  from  within  Maya. Please  note  that  this  method  of  rendering  is  best  suited  to  large  animation  sequences  rather  than  single  
images.    For example, Mental  Ray  Batch  through  Backburner  will  split  up  your  animation  job  into  groups  of  frames,  where  each  node  of  the  Farm  will  render  a  different  section  of  frames  rather  than  different  parts  of  the  same  image.    A  100  frame  animation, for  instance,  might  put  frames  1 though 20  on  one  node,  21 through 40  on  another  node,  41 thourh 60  on  a  third  node,  and  so  forth.    All  will  be  rendering  simultaneously.

These instructions are modified after documentation posted on-line on the School's web site at:

1. To begin, create your scene file and setup the rendering whatever options you wish to use in the render settings dialog box as per prior workshop tutorials:

2. To  render  using  the  Render  Farm  grid,  you  need  to  do  two  things  to  setup  your  file:

2.1 Set  your  Maya  Project  location.

The  location  where scene files and  images  will  be saved  to  when  rendered must be place on a location  on  the  School  of  Architecture  "ScanTemp" server.    
That is, the  only server that  is  currently  available  for  network  rendering  is  ScanTemp. ScanTemp is typically mapped to drive "W:\\archstore01.arch.virginia.edu\ScanTemp" on the School's public computers or to smb://archstore01.arch.virginia.edu/ScanTemp on the Mac OS. You  can  use  any  folder  within  Scantemp. Also note that you  must  use  the  network  for  network  rendering.    The  render farm  cannot  see  your  laptop,  nor  can  it  see  the  workstation  you  are  sitting  at.  

2.2 Send a BackBurner Job

To send a BackBurner Job, go to the "render" module, and then go to the menu item "Render/Create Backburner Job ..."

2.3 Within the dialog box titled "BackBurner for Maya" that follows:

2.3.1 Create a job test name (or use the default name) such as "test1"

2.3.2. Set the Manager location  to "128.143.138.81"

2.3.3. Type “maya2015” into the Server Group box.

2.3.4. Set the Renderer Path in the dialog to "C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2015/bin/Render.exe” on both Mac OS and Windows OS versions on Maya. Windows should have this automatically (though check). On Mac you’ll need to change it to this.

All the rest is now handled on the server end.

Note for the Window OS, the instructions posted on-line also provide an option to monitor the progress of the render farm for your job.