Are there any render management tools you use in 2025? We have a small 10 blade farm and an 8 person team. Our server people wont allow Backburner for some reason. Looking for suggestions
Thanks
Hey, amazon’s deadline comes to mind. I believe it’s now free to use with unlimited number of render servers. For applications like max, maya, houdini it comes with built in submission installers so it’s easy to get it working. The frame management is much better than backburner.
Thanks for the info I will check it out. As long as we dont have to log on to their cloud my IT will hopefully be ok with it
No it’s all local (they have some cloud option) but we don’t use it. It’s a bit of choir to install repository etc. Once its working, its pretty nice.
Wow you aren’t kidding on the setup, settings on top of settings and then a few more settings. LOL Thanks again
Let me know if you need help I’ve done it a thousand times already 
If you just like plug and play then try RenderFlow.
Renderflow is what backburner should have always been. it’s so easy to setup and use. I can highly recommend.
James
Thanks for your information. I have a question. Our setup:we have a 10 blade server based render farm and we will soon have a dedicated blade for license management and “Render Management”
Do we only need 1 license of RenderFlow for the dedicated machine assuming all of our Vray renders have the appropriate DR settings setup?
I have given up on trying to get Backburner to work, it keeps throwing errors no matter what I do
You need a license per rendernode. Don’t need a license for the server that distributes.
Oh OK I thought that if we setup the DR settings in VRAY with the VRAY render nodes we already have that we would only need one for the distributer and let VRAY DR take care of the rest
Not sure I’m following but DR means all nodes are helping the main node render 1 still or 1 frame. If you’d use your nodes like that (so they don’t get assigned different frames or stills), then I guess you only need 1 license, but I’m not sure if that’s the right way to go about this. If you’re rendering animations it’s better to assign each node to render part of that animation. If you’re only rendering stills and they take a very long time, than DR might be an option.
Yes mainly stills. The team would just like to be able to send a rendering and continue working while the farm renders
I know Deadline has a feature for “tiling” a render. Useful for very large images. The job is basically broken up into chunks/tiles, and each machine renders one tile, and then the image is combined after the fact. Not only does this let a lot of machines work on the job, but it also lowers the amount of ram used, which can sometimes be a problem for very large images.
The drawback of using DR when you have multiple people is that you have to either allow only few machine for 1 artist, so spread the machines and dedicate them, or have all machines and have them render one still at a time since once all machines get engaged by DR the other people who would want to use them, will have to wait.
For the farm rendering, if you are doing large images I would utilize DR not tile rendering. Reason being is that I often had issues with the stitching its more problems than it’s worth. DR is not without it’s own problems though.
It comes down to - how many still renders you have vs how many machines you have. If you have 20 stills and 8 machines then it’s probably better to have each machine do it’s own still and then move onto next one. If you have 5 stills and 8 machines, then it’s better to use DR on each one. You will probably always have some machines sitting idle though, for example DR is finishing a frame few cpus are taking a long time to finish - rest of DR is still committed to that job, maybe it’s changed now, but this is how I remember it. If you send 1 frame per 1 machine, then after most frames finish, 2 will be finishing up while others are idle.
Spreading frames per machine (not dr) is the most reliable way. DR can some times fail, get stuck on some machines, they become unresponsive etc. For long sequence animations (which is what we do 99% of the time), we always use 1 frame per machine.
what problems do you occasionally see with stitching tiles? I use it a lot, never have any problems. I’m not 100% sure our tiling/stitching setup is pure deadline though, it might have some modified stuff in it.
Honestly this was some years ago when I was using max. Mainly I think it was due to LC not being calculated properly, so stitched tiles had edges due to difference in lighting. Also, we had cases where tiles were stitched in wrong order. Again this was on deadline 7 or something like that.
I was going to go with deadline 10 but apparently Amazon is not creating any new accounts for that product they want you to goto Deadline Cloud
I wish I could just get backburner to work lol. All my team wants, is to be able to offload a rendering to the farm and continue working. Some of the Aircraft Interior renders, they do, take 2-3 hours with the farm. I was hoping with DR2 the “Dispatcher” would start a new render once the current one is complete automatically. Instead of the team members asking the other team members is your render done? in order to submit their own. We are going to assign a few blades to each user but it would be really nice to just be able to submit renders to the entire farm and have them finish one rendering at a time. I looked at Pulze Renderflow looks pretty good, but we would need 14 licenses and my managements appetite for another 2k subscription into perpetuity is low. VRAY DR is great for what we do but the un-productivity of sitting around waiting for the farm or waiting for a render to complete is the problem.
Thanks!
Why not use one of the open source render managers? I found few that kind of looked ok, didn’t try them though: