hi, i am wondering if there exists a software that can say open 3ds max and render a scene and save the files, i would love to be able to setup a few 3ds max files, set them in order which to render first, turn all but one max file and it renders when i got to sleep, then as that one is done it saves the images and opens another max file and renders the scene i have set, weather it be animation etc and it continues until it renders all the files i have set, is this even possible? sometimes i have a few things to render and which this was possible. If anyone says backburner i will shoot myself because i have never really used it
er.. backburner? thats exactly what its for, it comes with max, and its easy to use?
so it will do all this that i want?
its literally the only thing it does. you just wrote the product description of backburner.
its for rendering “on the back-burner” so to speak. tbh im quite surprised its possible to know max and -not- know backburner.
it has its quirks, and has not been significantly updated for about 100 years, but it works just fine for anyone who isnt a large production company.
and before you ask..:
* start backburner manager on a machine on your network.
* start servers on all machines you wish to render on.. make sure they are pointed at the manager in the config settings.
* start queue monitor on your workstation and connect to manager
* check queue monitor is showing the servers are present.
submit job from max to network rendering. point it to manager machine.
job will appear in queue monitor and start rendering.
animations will use all servers
stills will use one server by default.
you can use “split scanline” to divide a still amnongst many machines, or if you are using vray, you can turn on dr before submitting and it will render on the server, adn use all other machines via DR.
*dont use split scanline and DR together.
there is nore to it than that but thats basically it.
you can change job priority, suspend jobs, send jobs to specific machines, even tell backburner what hours of the day/days of the week it is allowed to render on specific machines..
sometimes some issues with firewalls, and you need all your maps etc on a drive that all machines can see.
nothing to stop you putting manager, server (slave) and queue monitor all on your workstation if you have only one machine.
perfect! thing is i have two machines and harder use anything but render farms since one machine is slower and i usually like to see renders to the end, i have tried backburner before actually but for smaller things and that was a long long time ago, somethings weren’t working so i just gave up but thanks for that fast response and instructions i think i will today give it a try, get myself up to date, maybe am getting old 
Check out my tutorial here and skip to part4:
http://vray.info/tutorials/vray\_distributed\_rendering\_and\_backburner/
At the time of writing, my workflow wasn’t as hectic as now and I didn’t need to que renders. All that changed and I use Backburner a lot for stills now.
Thanks Morne!
Nonsense, it get’s updated every year max does… 2016…<hit backspace>…2017. Voila!
I wonder how that Windows 95 UI it’s got going on scales in 4k.
Brilliant.
It’s also one of the best tools for self-improvement and learning anger-management
after finally checking out all the features and possibilities i finally started giving it a try but upon submitting a job through batch render i just keep getting a 3ds max adapter error, anyone ever has this? its my first time testing it on this pc
Backburner is one of the reasons I went with one mega machine.
We’ve never had any issues with backburner under 20 machines total. Our NY and London studios switched to deadline because 50 render nodes and another 20 workstations firing jobs to it all day will destroy it, but for small scale stuff it works perfectly.
well am trying to use it on one machine so far, havent figured out how to add other servers etc yet, but seems the error is what’s stoping it now
its likely a permissions issue. are you running the manager as administrator? backburner is also fussy with windows firewall, but i guess on a single machine this should not be an issue.
do you ahve the slave/server showing up in the queue monitor as ready to accept a job (green icon)?
figured it out, its was ipv6, disabled it now all is ok, trying to render a bunch of cameras from batch render but only one camera seems to be rendering, any solutions here?
o scrap that, it works, i was saving it out to different file locations for specific reasons, it was a older batch render file, i however have another pc which is not being used at the moment, how do i add it as another server to say render some files? and say i want to pause rendering on the main pc how do i do that?
ok i found out how to add the server on the second machine, how but its failing to find the output path, anyone have any suggestions here?
make sure your paths are UNC paths (asset tracker)