Render Farm advice

[viicsy]

Im doing a project at my university and i need some advice.

I have to build the render farm off of the network.

I would like some advice on what rendering software to use.

Can anyone help please?

 

Vicky

[AJLynn]

What computers do you have access to and what software do you already use?

[viicsy]

2Ghz dual core , 1Gb ram with windows server 2003. I have 4 of them

im using 3ds max for the designing of the animations.

[DanGrover]

Long story short:

 

Stick with 3ds Max and Mental Ray to render with. It's the simplest way if you're just starting (and the goal to is build a render farm). Mental Ray comes with Max as standard. It also comes with a bit of software called BackBurner, which is a render management software. It's a bit tricky to set up, but nothing too daunting - there's a guide on the Autodesk website, I believe. In short, you have one of the computers run the Backburner Manager, then all of them run the Backburner Server (and in the server settings, point them towards the IP address of the computer running the Backburner Manager). They will then all connect to it (in theory!) and if you submit a render in Max (ensure you have "Net Render" checked on the render dialogue box), it should distribute frames between the 4 computers. You can check their status using the Backburner Monitor on any PC on the network.

[viicsy]

Cheers, ill give that a go !

[Howkey]

Do i have to Install 3dsMax on every computer with separate license to it or just 1 license of Max installed on many computers ?

Also the Vray should be one license or what?

 

I want to setup small renderfarm in office with one computer as render machine and 2 users will "send" their needs to it from 2 computers to render from 3ds Max.

 

We currently have 2 3dsMax license and 1 Vray dongle license

 

Thanks for help

[DanGrover]

You do need to install both Max and VRay on every machine. However, you don't need a Max license for every render node. I think I read somewhere that you can have 8 nodes in a render farm per max license you have, or something, but that may well be totally made up, as I've never experienced more than a handful of computers in backburner!

 

You don't need to register Max at all, just install it. You could even install the trial from the autodesk website, I believe.

 

With VRay, you need to install it, and when you do you can go into the Start Menu, find Chaos Group and in the licensing bit somewhere there's a config you can run. What you have to do is give it the IP address of either the VRay license server (if you have one) or a PC with the VRay Dongle attached. That should be enough for it to work.

[Howkey]

Thanks,

 

but will it Vray work if i will render in future on 3 PC's at the same time 1 scene?

 

I mean that the dongle is to use on 1 PC at the same time only dont it ?

 

thanks anyway, very helpful to me

[DanGrover]

Thanks,

 

but will it Vray work if i will render in future on 3 PC's at the same time 1 scene?

 

I mean that the dongle is to use on 1 PC at the same time only dont it ?

 

thanks anyway, very helpful to me

 

That should work fine. They just need to know that you have a legit copy of VRay at all. If you take a look at this bit of the Chaos Group website, it says...

 

Although V-Ray does not require a separate license to render through backburner, it does require access to the V-Ray license server. The same is true for distributed rendering. After you install V-Ray on the render slave, you must tell it where to look for the V-Ray license server. If 3dsmax is also licensed for that machine, you can use the Render Scene dialog as described above. If a 3dsmax license is not installed on the render slave, you can use a small external program which is accessible from the start menu if you used the V-Ray installer (Start menu > Programs > Chaos Group > V-Ray for 3dsmax > Licensing > Administration > Change V-Ray client license settings) or from the \V-Ray folder if you installed manually from a .zip file. This program can also be run from the command line (use -help option to see usage notice).

[adarsh]

With 3ds Max one license is required for opening up the 3ds Max application GUI and no licenses are required for rendering nodes. The licensing structure for 3ds max allows for the use of up to 9,999 render nodes, which means you

need only purchase as many seats of the software necessary to support an actual user.

 

Thank you,

Adarsh

[akinlolugboji]

I read somewhere that nodes on a farm need not have a head ie monitor, mouse, keyboard etc just the cpu. My questions is that in such form how to you if the node has fully booted for to accept a task from the farm, also how do you monitor progress on such nodes?

[adarsh]

Render Farm software are : client server based model with the submission and monitoring interface (via GUI or via Web Interface or Both)

 

Most of the render farm compute nodes or slaves or clients doing the rendering are without monitor, keyboard and mouse. These compute nodes run the client software of a render manager as a service. This service starts on boot up and connects to the render manager and monitor and receives the jobs to render.

 

1) When the nodes/clients m/c are connected then the Render manager/monitor show they are running/idle/executing/on

2) When the nodes/clients m/c are not connected to the render manager/monitor does not list those nodes/clients or they might carry their status as down.

 

Cheers,

Adarsh

[Tommy L]

Render Farm software are : client server based model with the submission and monitoring interface (via GUI or via Web Interface or Both)

 

Most of the render farm compute nodes or slaves or clients doing the rendering are without monitor, keyboard and mouse. These compute nodes run the client software of a render manager as a service. This service starts on boot up and connects to the render manager and monitor and receives the jobs to render.

 

1) When the nodes/clients m/c are connected then the Render manager/monitor show they are running/idle/executing/on

2) When the nodes/clients m/c are not connected to the render manager/monitor does not list those nodes/clients or they might carry their status as down.

 

Cheers,

Adarsh

 

That didnt make much sense to me....

 

There are two ways of moniotoring 'headless' computers:

 

1: KVM switch. This is a piece of hardware that connects one 'head' to multiple machines.

2: Virtual connection....there are several ways of doing this. Essentially, the computer you are using (probably your workstation) connects to the node over a network and taps into the graphics card on the machine. You then view the node's desktop from your own machine.

 

I personally use #1.

[AJLynn]

Put the whole thing in a rack and rackmount the KVM, same as a datacenter.

[adarsh]

Also please look for PCoIP from Teradici

[adarsh]

Sorry if I was not clear.

Render farm monitoring software have VNC / RDP / Node Remote control built in to their GUI. These tools can be used to monitor the nodes without the need for the input/output devices.

That didnt make much sense to me....

 

There are two ways of moniotoring 'headless' computers:

 

1: KVM switch. This is a piece of hardware that connects one 'head' to multiple machines.

2: Virtual connection....there are several ways of doing this. Essentially, the computer you are using (probably your workstation) connects to the node over a network and taps into the graphics card on the machine. You then view the node's desktop from your own machine.

 

I personally use #1.

[Sumon Gupta]

i am a 3ds max and vray user and was gathering information of how to built a renderfarm with 4 computers.....after going thru the posts i think that this might be the thread where i can post my queries.....

My queries:

 

1. i have gone thru this link http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/ .......is it possible to built a renderfarm using this microwulf?

2. If yes then my next question is whether i need my application software (3ds max and vray) to be installed in all the render nodes?

3. If that is also yes then my third question is how to install 3ds max and vray in ubuntu linux OS?

 

any answer will be of much help to me

 

Sumon

[AJLynn]

You don't need a Beowulf type system. That's a way of managing a cluster of computers as if they were a supercomputer. What you want is a bunch of PCs that must be running a recent copy of Windows. (Max won't run on Linux and running it in emulation is fully pointless.) You need to install Max and Vray but you don't need new licenses for each node - check the docs on render node install. There is render farm management software but with only 4 PCs you can just use Backburner and Vray distributed rendering. A KVM switch will do for when you need to get at the PCs.

[Sumon Gupta]

thank you for answering my post. But i would like to add to my queries that if it is not possible to use max in linux, what about the render management softwares like smedge/squidnet etc whose manuals state that they support cross platform render nodes. Are those for the application softwares supported by linux or something else? Besides i would also like to say that i have already successfully performed distributed rendering using vray and max, using the computers in a windows network as suggested by you. But is it possible to render max and vray in a cluster (windows or linux)?.....thank you once again for the reply..

[AJLynn]

There is rendering software that runs on Linux but unless they've done something I didn't hear about Vray isn't one of them. It's also not "cluster" software but I'm not sure I understand what the benefit would be of using a Beowulf cluster over a traditional farm.