author
Sam
Weisbard
Chicago-based Studio/Maya consultant for training and production work
sweisbard@attbi.com
special
thanks to
Design Engine
for hosting these pages.
Remote Batch Rendering on Windows.
08.22.01
So you want to render on someone else's machine in the office? Great! Even better if they're under a tight deadline and their system isn't fast enough for them already.
Maya
There are lots of solutions varying in price and complexity. Start by checking out the highend3d.com Maya Render section. Below are some applications that will do this for your local network. Also, there are service bureaus that will render for you on their systems.
| http://www.rendercorp.com/ | Render Max Lite |
| http://www.icon.co.za/~poweronx | Lemon |
| http://www.vvertex.com/ | Muster |
| http://3dsite.com/people/erco/rush/ | Rush |
| http://www.platform.com/ | Load Sharing Facility |
Studio
Other than trying to adapt a solution above, try VNC (Virtual Network Computing), a piece of freeware from AT&T Research. This allows you to pull up a desktop from a remote NT machine. From there it would be easy to start command-line renderings as long as you had shared drives (the drive on your machine would show up on your render server's desktop as, say F: drive) so that the server had access to image files, sdl's, etc. If you want some info on this, its at http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/.
Here's a side note on how to specify which processor to direct a process to. Run the command, then in the Task Manager click on the process with the right mouse button. Select SET AFFINITY and it will allow you to choose which processor(s) will execute the task.