Render Wrangling

Render Wrangling

In week 5, I managed to help Semester 6 students with their film by being their render wrangler. With my knowledge from having completed Cert IV Information Technology and Networking prior to my education at JMC, I knew how to set up servers and network computers. I was able to set up a render farm on Saturday with 2 rooms where all the computers were rendering scenes. Believe me, with about 30 computers to the render farm, the render times where fast. In this post, I am going to explain my process and I intend to use this rendering process to my production.

I will now explain my process in a brief tutorial. I do not want to turn this post into a lesson in networking and I.T.

The first step was to set up the manager computer so that the project files are shared over the network.  I moved everything to the projects folder.

To make the files sharable, right click on the project folder

Right click on projects folder àsharing àAdvanced Sharingàtick “share this folder”, à “permissions” tab àthen set everyone to full Control.

If you used a project file correctly all textures and references are now accessed over the network.

Step 2 Open manager, monitor and server on the central computer which manages the render farm.

Then use CMD, also referred to as “command prompt” and run the command ipconfig. The ipconfig command gives the user the ip address of their computer.

You can then set the manager monitor and server with the same ip address as the central computer which manages the render farm.

Then in Maya, you can set the project folder location to have the ip address in its directory pathway or any pathway that will work over the network.

On all the other computers, you need to run Server and set the ip address to find the manager computer.

Then when in Maya you can create the back burner jobs with the ip address added in the manager name field and set an appropriate task size and job name.

It all went well and the monitor showed that the computers were rendering.

Make sure that all referenced rigs, textures and files are in the Project folder and therefore can be found over a network. No texture should be on C: drive or any other local location or it will come up with error 211 because it cannot find the files.

When the rendering is finished, all the computers should be restarted so that the configurations are set back to normal.

Self-analysis

One of the semester 6 students said to me, “We would have not made the final film assessment deadline if it was not for you setting up the farm”. There are a number of procedures that can be done to improve the work flow but the important thing to me is it works. I am pleased that my production now has a render farm. As there are less students at JMC on Saturdays, this would be the best day to set it up as there are more computers available.