small render farm advice needed

[breadcrums]

Hi,

My company is currently switching from max to maya, and we are also getting new gear...

We are going to end up with 4 artists each on 32 core workstations, and will have x3 leftover workstations each 24 core machines.

We would like to use the old machines as a render farm, and possibly combine all our workstations at night/ weekends. I'm not sure what makes the most sense though.

What we wouldn't want to happen is for an individuals workstation to get sucked into the farm while they are working, but we would like for it to be available to the farm like at night when we leave.

We are also not sure how to setup the jobs- say we each have 10 renders to do at night. that's a total of 40 shots. Will they go into some kind of 'queue', splitting the job up on all cores one shot at a time or what?

currently googling all this stuff and Distributed Rendering and Deadline but any insight would be greatly appreciated!

I should maybe mention we do mostly stills but will be doing animations in the near future as well

[Morbid Angel]

Here are a few answers:

- You can turn on slave mode on your workstation before leaving office and it will automatically contribute at night/weekend, then turn it off in the morning.
- You will need a render manager, maya/max comes with backburner Autodesk's own render management system. Its not the best, but its free. Deadline is great, or any render manager really, issue is it can get expensive, I think each render license is $185 USD, so if you have 10 render nodes you will have to spend $1850 USD on the render nodes (ok if you have a budget for it).
- DR is an option, but you still need a way to queue the jobs and have them rendered sequentially (even stills) and render manager is a best bet.

How this typically works is you have a submission like UI in max/maya where you save your scene before rendering (with all the frame outputs and paths specified) and then send it to the render manager, it then assigns each frame from a given job to render slaves, they render and move to another frame, once all frames rendered they move to next job.

With DR you can submit jobs to render manager while having DR checked in your scene and it will use all render slaves for a given frame (good for large single stills) But that's a bit more complicated, cross that bridge when you get there.