render farm for rendering?

[spacematt]

This must be a dumb question, but I haven't been able to figure it out. We have Windows workstations for sims, and a Linux renderfarm for VRay Standalone. How are we to render our sims on the farm?

Do we have to install Phoenix on the renderfarm nodes?
Or will the renderfarm nodes just render sims directly without any extra installation?
Or do we export vrscenes or VRayVolumeGrids from Phoenix which non-Phoenixed workstations and nodes can read?

The last option is appealing, as it means we can invite our Mac workstations back into the pipeline, but I haven't got either to work, or at lest not work well in the case of VRayVolumeGrid and not work at all with vrscenes.

At the moment I can't just install Phoenix on the render nodes and see what happens, because I already know we're going to have trouble with matching the paths in the caches and that's going to need a bit of dev time to fix.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

V-Ray can't render Phoenix directly, but there are some scenarios that might be helpful:

- Naturally, installing Phoenix would render the full package - meshes, particles and voxels / from vrscenes or from native scenes. Phoenix also has a render/sim slave install type you could use if you don't need any GUI functionality.

- Without installing Phoenix, you could export your sims as VolumeGrids to vrscenes [you can set this option from the Phoenix Atmosphere settings (in case you are using Max)]. However, this means you'd be able to render only meshes and voxels, but no particles.

- Without Phoenix installed and without doing anything specific to the scenes, you should be able to render Phoenix sims from vrscenes as meshes, but no particles or voxels. You need to set the environment variable VRAY_PHOENIX_AS_MESH to 1 in order to force this.

Hope this helps, cheers!

[spacematt]

Thanks for the great info, I'll set about installing on our farm machines, meanwhile a couple of spin-off questions...

I'm using Maya, so does this mean the export to VolumeGrid inside a vrscene is not available?

Also, I've been able to manually get .aur caches into a VolumeGrid, and that renders fine, but obviously all the shading settings are not carried over from the original sim. Are there any tools to address this? It seems like in theory, I ought to be able to export VolumeGrid inside an .ma file directly from my sim scene with all settings intact. I might invest time in making such a tool, if there isn't one, and it's definitely possible.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Ah, in Maya it's in the Phoenix Preferences dialogue - "Use V-Ray 3 Shaders".

Unfortunately for now there is no way to transfer settings between Phoenix and a VolumeGrid in Maya. In Max you can save a render preset and load it from the VolumeGrid and vice versa - we have to implement this for Maya as well..

[spacematt]

Aha, many thanks for the response again. The render presets thing makes a lot of sense.

I already had 'Use V-Ray 3 Shaders' enabled, but my vrscenes don't seem to get a VolumeGrid. I get the following, and it doesn't look like what I'd expect... (contents omitted)...

PhxShaderSim PhoenixFDSimulator1@0 { ...
PhxShaderCache PhoenixFDSimulator1@cache@0 { ...
PhxShaderSimVol __PhoenixFDSimVolume__ { ...


Should I see something called volumeGrid or similar?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Yup, that's the VolumeGrid - it's prefixed with 'PhxShader', while Phoenix is prefixed with 'PhoenixFD'