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Friday, March 25, 2011

Network rendering in Maya

My last project was to try network rendering in maya. What is network rendering ? short variant is: you have 2 or more computers and you need to render something, if you will use just your workstation is possible to wait some time, but why to not use and the rest of your computers ? Yes is possible with some work. Maya documentation from autodesk site is difficult to follow because is not well focused and help from other users is not to much on the internet.
Generally speaking first you need 2 or more computers but not more then 8 if you have one single core processors on those machines. On the master machine you will use to render mental ray but before that you must to setup maya.rayhosts file according with Maya documentation. This file is just a text file where you put the IP from slave hosts and port number used for comunication. On slave machines you must to have Maya with mental ray satellite installed. When everything is ready from render menu chose render (batch or single frame) with options and be sure to have network render check and press render.
Because nothing is easy, my problem was to set properly maya.rayhosts file which is a text file with .txt extention changed to .rayhosts but be careful to format the text inside to plan text first and be sure to have this content: slave machines IP:port number (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxxx) with no space inside and every new IP on a new row.
Conclusion: render job on the local machine 6 minutes and 8 seconds, render job on the one slave machine identical with  the master one 8 minutes and 50 seconds, job render with local and network render (two identical machines conected with a simple UTP LAN cable) 3 minutes and 34 seconds.

PS: because my script editor refuse to display verbosity information higher than level 3 (warnings) no matter what settings I made from render menu, I discovered that on mac is very good to use console from operating sistem to display status messages from render jobs.

1 comment:

  1. "PS: because my script editor refuse to display verbosity information higher than level 3 (warnings) no matter what settings I made from render menu, I discovered that on mac is very good to use console from operating sistem to display status messages from render jobs."

    in other OS stdout not wieved in scrip editor.
    in win, whith maya exist separate output window.
    in linux i run maya from console to see it(just like you do on mac)

    ReplyDelete

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