How do you use Netrender in version 16


Netrenderer is based on two (actuall 3, but that is not important for the user) parts.
- Renderserver - to create rendering-jobs, etc and supervise everything
- Rendermessenger - to render the stuff.

With netrenderer, you can create your own render farm or batch-render from different cameras, chors or projects, using all the cores available in your computer (if your licence allows that).
It is now fully integrated into the normal version of A:M version 16, so you get software which has been more expensive than A:M itself for free.

1.) Start the Renderserver
2.) There will be a wizard guiding you through the set up process of the Renderserver. The wizard is quite intelligent and in most cases you dont need to change anything there, so I recommend to give it a good name, etc.
3.) Start as many Rendermessengers as you wish and your licence, and the amount of cores in your computer, allows. As I understand it there will be the option for a version with up to 8 messengers per machine, standard is 2. You will be notified if you hit the limit for your version. The Rendermessengers will be shown in the task-bar.
4.) Back to the renderserver-window: Go to File > New.
5.) The Renderserver-software has a gui containing three main areas:
- At the top: Job-Area (here you will setup your jobs)
- Middle: Messenger-Assignment-Area
- Bottom: All available Messengers (Slaves)
6.) Rightclick in the "Job-Area" and choose "New Job".
7.) A wizard will start up. Here you can select a project file, a choreography and the camera of the chor you want to render from AND quite important a name to identify the job.
8.) The next step in the wizard will be the Output Options. Which File format should be used, etc. I highly recommend to render to TGA or OpenEXR image-sequences. DONT RENDER TO VIDEO-FILES! If something goes wrong, you will lose everything that was rendered in that job. If you render to an image sequence, you will only lose the specific frames being currently rendered.
9.) In the last step, enter the Render Settings. This process should be familiar to anyone who has rendered an image or animation in A:M.
10.) After that you will see a new job has been created in the job-area.
11.) Save the pool.
12.) Now we need to assign render messengers to the job. For that just drag and drop available messengers to the Messenger-Assignment-Area.
13.) After a small while you should see windows open up. These are the render messengers. They will now load the scene and render it out. It is important, that all of the messengers can receive the data needed to render. So if you are using Netrenderer with more than one computer, you have to make sure the same data is available on all machines at the same spots. (ie on every machine C:RenderjobTest-Project), or on a file server on the network..


A few notes:
- Render Messengers which are not connected to the server are shown in the taskbar with a little space between the two yellow connectors. Double-click on them and check the IP-adress. Is the IP address the same as the one shown in the Wizard of the renderserver? If not, change it to the IP your server is available at. Or if you are only using a single computer, the IP address of your computer.
- Sometimes a Render Messenger crashes. This is not too common, but can happen. If that happens, just re-start it. The server will remember it. If it was Slave1, it is possible that you may need to shut down Slave2 as well, to be able to restart Slave1.
- You can create many jobs in the job-area. So if you need to render from different cameras, several projects or stuff like that, you can just create as many jobs as you need.
The Render Server will assign the jobs to the messengers automatically if they are shown in the job-list.
- Right-click is your friend! There are many more optins like showing error-messages, resetting frames to "not rendered", deleting certain frames from the render-list, etc. Just play a little bit... it is really very easy to understand.

Tags: netrender, render, render messenger, render server, render slave, rendermessenger, renderserver, renderslave
2011-01-06 03:41 Hash, Inc. {writeRevision}
Average rating: 0 (0 Votes)

You can comment this FAQ

Chuck Norris has counted to infinity. Twice.