Setting up Render farm help...

[ngrava]

Hey everyone

Can someone point me in the direction of some kind of documentation for setting up a render farm for Vray for Maya? I've been combing the internet but I must be using the wrong combination of words because all I get is a bunch of stuff about distributed rendering. Anyway, we have our farm all set up for Max and Vray using Deadline but now we need to start rending with Maya as well. I'm not a Maya pro so I'm not at all sure where to start.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

There is script for deadline and maya. You can use that to use deadline with farm.

[Morbid Angel]

Deadline comes with scripts for various programs it supports. They reside in: DeadlineRepository\submission\Maya

Once you place that onto a deadline shelf in maya UI, you can call deadline submitter and submit your job to it. Should be simple from there on.

[ngrava]

Thanks for the replies! Actually, I already know about the deadline scripts. My issue is more related to the actually setup instructions of the render farm. Do I have to install Maya on all the machines? Can I just install Vray on the machines like Arnold? What's the best way to do it: Vray export? Maya Batch? and if Maya batch Which exe is best: MayaBatch.exe or Render.exe? Etc, etc.

There's got to be some kind of documentation on building a Vray for Maya render farm from scratch. Is there not? I mean, how did you guys learn to setup your render farms?

Thanks again!

[Morbid Angel]

I see. Yes you need to install maya on all the machines. You can deploy a maya image and just run it through a script for a silent install, should be less of clicking this way.

With vray you have two options, one you can run the installer and install it on every machine. Two, you can create a central location and run it from there using that as your source. But to make that work you need to set all the environment variables as described in the manual through the .cmd file before commiting a render.

In deadline, when you submit through maya you must set force build to none, and in deadline in configure plugins you need to set your mayabatch to point not to mayabatch.exe but to the custom .cmd file you created with the env variables. Once that's done it should work.

The benefit of method two is that you can update easily builds if you have to, without installing anything. So say you have 100-200 machines, manual install can be a pain