It's not Backburner, it's your crappy network!

[TomD_Arch]

This is a rant, and I hope some others can sympathize. i have spent the past year working with a guy in my IT department to get a render farm going with 3ds Max and mental ray. We were rolling along , just o.k., with 2014. last week something crazy was going on so we just decided to go ahead and upgrade to 2017. It's just a never ending parade of Network security, policy, drive letter issues. The network will loss connectivity to the manager node and when (If) it comes back up some amount of nodes will now be stuck in "Absent" mode. Usually nothing, but a hard re-boot will bring them back online. Of course you have the random jerk who decides the night you need to set-up renders to go, they want to power their computer down. But, since my IT guy won't provide me with a list of the people for fear they will get pissed when they are told their computers are used at night for a render farm, I can't email them and request them to leave their computers on. I could go on..!

[Nic H]

you should look at upgrading to deadline

bomb proof and highly customisable

[Chris MacDonald]

Ask for a budget for an actual dedicated render farm.

[TomD_Arch]

Unfortunately, Visualization is not something held with high importance. "Can't we get these out of revit?", "Why do we need a render farm?", "We already have a guy in the Florida office we bought an nVidia graphics card for." or the ever popular "We can just Photoshop all the furniture in later" are standard responses from various higher ups. All of which were preceded with "And we want to do super nice renderings this time, not like that ones So-and-so Blahblah did on the 'LOL Crap' project we did last month."

 

So the whole render farm thing is tolerated as long as it's not costing any extra money and IT isn't expending billable hours setting-up or maintaining it. The one guy who IS working on it with me is nice enough to find bits of time here and there.

 

What I need to do is New Years Resolution style motivate myself to make some changes in this up coming year. I need to get over my anxiety of trying to look for a full-time job at a visualization firm. I've applied for plenty of positions in architecture and have that interview down. I'm not sure I would even know where to begin to prep for an interview in Visualization. Maybe I prep the same way? But, what are the intricacies I need to be aware that will help me get hired?

 

Maybe a better title for this thread should be "It's not your render farm OR your network. It's your place of employment"

[John Dollus]

I'd suggest you approach the problem from a business side and submit a report detailing the ROI on what you feel you need to be successful and, in turn, make the firm more successful. A simple breakdown of your hours spent dealing with inadequate infrastructure combined with that of other support staff as well as a healthy 'missed opportunity' figure should do the trick. Arch firms understand billings and profit loss more so than they will ever understand the niche needs of what you do for them. Deadline is a solid recommendation for a network manager but it is $$ for anything more than a couple systems. You can test it out for free and submit a report comparing the time involved with a high failure rate free solution (backburner) compared to an investment in a powerful infrastructure tool (deadline).

Make sure to include pie charts. they love pie charts.

[Matt McDonald]

We don't have a farm either. I install Max on every computer in the office that is worthwhile to render on and connect via backburner. I've had 90+ machines connecting reliably for a couple of years. I get some help from IT but by-in-large it's my baby. If you can spell out any specific issues I might be able to help.

[Francisco Penaloza]

I'd suggest you approach the problem from a business side and submit a report detailing the ROI on what you feel you need to be successful and, in turn, make the firm more successful. A simple breakdown of your hours spent dealing with inadequate infrastructure combined with that of other support staff as well as a healthy 'missed opportunity' figure should do the trick. Arch firms understand billings and profit loss more so than they will ever understand the niche needs of what you do for them. Deadline is a solid recommendation for a network manager but it is $$ for anything more than a couple systems. You can test it out for free and submit a report comparing the time involved with a high failure rate free solution (backburner) compared to an investment in a powerful infrastructure tool (deadline).

Make sure to include pie charts. they love pie charts.

 

I totally agree with John, numbers explain them self, before I was hired my boss deal with similar problems until he did a clear presentation and explained how much they were loosing when they planning to 'save money' doing things other way. You need to realize, they do not understand what exactly you are doing, they know you do renderings, but they don't know how. he think is the same way they did their renderings at school. lost of loose photoshop and nah, that's good enough.

 

Now we have 6 machines as dedicated render node, when we need to scale we can do it up to 100.

It is no easy, we have a new security system that make connection hard. but it is workable.

Backbuner is very finicky any ways, Deadline will work a lot better for sure, but for our company those 100 licenses will be too much.

 

Regarding how to apply to other work place, I would suggest to grab the best 3 or 5 projects, hopefully one of them is an animation and explain how you when thru. Time to develop and techniques used. Most companies won't care much how you did it, but if you can develop project on time and with low resources. they always want some one who they can trust.

best luck.

[TomD_Arch]

We don't have a farm either. I install Max on every computer in the office that is worthwhile to render on and connect via backburner. I've had 90+ machines connecting reliably for a couple of years. I get some help from IT but by-in-large it's my baby. If you can spell out any specific issues I might be able to help.

 

My problem is I am not allowed to just go around installing 3dsMax on peoples machines. Trust me if I could I would. Additionally, the company has decided to start getting rid of desktops giving out laptops as replacements and giving everyone one of those little data boxes that runs everything from a cloud server like Citrix.

[SgWRX]

that sucks. although laptops can still be quite a bit better than just one machine! i can't believe people would be pissed about using their machines over night. i've always been fine in picking out a few machines, letting people know when i'm going to be rendering. in one place i had a "generic" network account that everyone knew the password to... that way they can unlock their machines in the morning if they come in early and i just tell them if it's still rendering in the morning just close the server program.

 

another thought is, as far as some machines suddenly not working, you have to manage windows power settings (especially on laptops) to never put them to sleep or hybernate, never save power with network cards or other relavant apps.

 

good luck - but man, you'd think they see the importance of rendering out 1,000 frames in 1 night vs 1 week!