Network Rendering with Backburner

[Matt Sugden]

I'm currently looking at the possibilty of getting a few extra pcs for a render farm. But first I'm trying to get a simple scene to render across my lan with workstation and laptop. From what I'm reading about it, it should be a very simple process, and with the queue monitor everything looks right, both PCs are present. But unfortuantely I can not seem to get the render to get the laptop out of idle status.

 

I've looked into file sharing for the output file etc... but to no avail. I'm not using any shared objects or textures in the scene either.

 

Anyone any ideas.....

[Woody]

I had a similar problem. The thing that seemed to cure it was by mapping all the shared drives with the same letters across all the machines we had.

 

Also if you're using a firewall check that its switched off as that can cause problems.

 

Hope that helps.

[Tim Nelson]

Are you rendering a still or an animation?

 

If its a still, the only way you can get backburner to work (& use both computers) is if you use the render strips option.

[ChrisE]

this also applies to rendering avi's. not that you should ever render to an avi. they need to be image seqence

[Matt Sugden]

I was trying to render a still with brazil at first, but then I thought it would be less complicated to try just a simple anim first using no plug-ins etc..

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

backburner typically works by sending one frame to one server, whether it be a single frame, or an animation. but as mentioned, there are ways around it. strip rendering, and what ever method brazil uses. in the past couple of days i have been playing with vray and distributed rendering. it is sweet. it sends a bucket to each computer you have connected, that computer renders the bucket, then kicks it back. so far i have had 6 machines hooked together to crank out an image. someday when i am here late, i amgoing to see how many i connect to crank out an image. i have a feeling i will be limited by the low number of computers that are allowed to connec to windows xp pro, which is 10, including the local machine. anyway, didn't mean to side track the conversation.