Backburner questions

[bigroo]

Hi all,

 

I'm new to Backburner but I've been longing to hook up my spare pc's to try out network rendering. I started with 1 manager & 1 extra server.

I am rendering a single frame to test and expected both machines to be contributing towards the effort but when I opened the monitor, only 1 machine was processing while the other was idle. So I thought okay, I'll just assign the other to the selected job but only 1 seems to want to render. The questions I have are for now,

 

1. Does Backburner only work for animation?

2. Do I need to set the percentages each machine will process?

 

Thanks in anticipation.

[bigroo]

I think I noticed that the server machine launched max as well but when I started looking into the monitoring later on with more test renders, it wasn't appearing to launch.

 

Another question,

 

1. Should it launch on all machines?

2. Does it just distribute to the most available & best option ? (ie fastest pc for the job)

 

Thanks

[JamesTaylor]

backburner used in its most common method will assign one frame to be rendered by one machine... this is used for managing the rendering of an animation which may consist of many hundreds of frames, when one machine finishes a frame backburner will assign it to render the next frame in the series etc.

 

Backburner can be used to break up an image into strips and assign each strip to a different machine on the network. when all the srtips are rendered they are then automatically compiled into a single file that makes the final render. I'm sure the settings for this are covered in the help files, but its pretty straight forward and the relevant settings should be self evident with a little exploring of the backburner settings.

 

a slight alternative to backburner is available when using 3rd party render engines such as vray and mental ray. these engines support distrubuted rendering (DR) / satelite render nodes respectively - the general premise of this method is that a single frame that is rendered on your machine can draw the processing power of other machines on the network to aid the render process.