Setting Vray up on Backburner Only System?

[MegaPixel]

I'm trying to figure out a more optimal way to setup my backburner render farm in the office. Currently, I've installed both 3DS Max and Backburner on over a dozen PCs in the office. My question is, can I get away with just installing the Backburner software on the render nodes and if so, will Vray work on a Backburner only render node? I ask this because I remember during the Vray installation process, it asks to locate both the 3DS MAX directory and it's plugins directory - both of which won't exist with a backburner only setup?

I'm working on setting up a dedicated Manager PC, but currently I tend to run both the manager and server on my own workstation. This setup isn't working well because rendered frames arn't being reassembled on the host machine but are being left scattered throughout the farm.

Maybe I'm all washed up and need a slap in the face but either way, I'd like my confusion cleared up. Thanks in advance - Dave

[joconnell]

Well, backburner doesnt provide anything as such, it's merely a program to manage and assign frames to a machine. It doesnt include any max file handling capabilities itself so it needs a copy of max on the machine so it can open the file, it needs the plugins in max to deal with any of the objects in the scene and it needs the command line renderer in max to actually render files (or vray in this case).

The only solution to things likes this are to have stand alone renderers such as mental ray or renderman - each of these get around the plugin and program issue by having their own file format that contains all of the data needed by the renderer to describe a scene and render it, effectively removing the need for the program that made the file on each render node. That said if you do this you're limiting yourself to the objects that the renderers file format supports - say for example you were using a 3dsmax plugin for your scene like dreamscape or afterburn. An external file format like mental rays MI file or rendemans rib file mightnt have support for afterburn or dreamscape so you bascially can't use it with an external renderer.

The way you're going about things at the moment is correct aside from one point. You say that the renders are scattered throughout the farm - most companies have a central server machine that they use to store work in progress max scenes, texutres etc and map this drive to all of the workstations and render nodes as the same drive letter. Say for examle you set up your new manager system with a big raid drive and share it across the network. Then you go to each machine and map that shared drive as the same drive letter - lets say R: for arguments sake. When you set up your scene files to render, you set the output path for the rendered files to a directory on the R: drive that all of the machines can see so you get everything stored in one place afterwards. Also it means theres only one drive to back up at night to give you some redundancy.

Hope this helps.

John

[MegaPixel]

joconnell,

Only recently, I've had the opportunity to create a dedicated server viewable by all pc's in my network so I'm looking forward to applying your suggestions to my new netwrok setup. I was doing things fairly old-school by making sure all directory structures were exactly the same on all servers so that wherever I saved to on the host machine, each server pc would have a corresponding directory to save to. Then I would have to come in the following morning and "harvest" all the frames and deposit them back on one computer. What a Pain in the Ass!

Let me ask you this, will saving the project to a network drive also solve the problem of restitching split line stripes back together automatically? Currently, my split line renders error out on the restitch process so again, I have to manually restitch images together again...


Thanks - Dave

[joconnell]

I would imagine so but to be honest I havent used the strip render functionality yet - I used to use an implementation of this in arnold a few years back which relied on a common file being saved but that's as close as I get. Hopefully someone else can field that one.

[jhiler]

By saving to the server your Split Scan line should work. What it is doing currently is that it is looking in C:\renders (or wherever you told it to save the splits) and it is only looking on the one machine that receives the command to stitch it all together. So if it can't find all the strips in that one location then it will error out.


Just make sure that if you create a network drive on each machine that the letter of the drive is the same throughout. As joconnell said if you use R:\ on one machine to map to your server, then it needs to be R:\ on all the other machines as well.

Hope this helps.
-jerry

[MegaPixel]

Thank you both. I appreciate the help. Things are on the up and up here now.

Dave