Error Code Adventures: Setting up (and making it work) a Render Farm with Maya, Mental Ray, and Backburner

@kaplandesignlab and I at the office today. Err, render farm. :) #TheGreatMigration pic.twitter.com/0ldJ9Y4dO9
— Kevin G. Schmidt (@kevingschmidt) October 5, 2013

Very recently I was contacted by a producer who is working on a feature animated movie that wanted me to act as a consultant for the creation of the Production Trailer for the film. Apparently I am one of few people in Nevada with the technical knowledge/ experience for setting up reliable, fast performing Render Farms (within a reasonable budget as far as Render Farm standards go.) 

For this project I was also given the lead on creating lighting, acting as quality control for texturing, and for optimizing rendering preferences/ executing rendering. 

While I do have extensive knowledge in building and maintaining render farms (refer to post: http://jonathankaplan.blogspot.com/2012/04/tutorial-using-backburner-and-vray.html ) the last and most recent render farm I built was constructed with 3ds Max, Vray Distributed Rendering, and Backburner. 

Crossing over to a Maya/ Mental Ray model took some getting used to. First I would like to warn anyone attempting this: Maya & Mental Ray's Network Render is a little more complex than the setup and execution of a 3ds Max with Vray Render Network. There are subtle differences that if not properly understood will make the process take several hours more than it should.

Despite the differences and deficiencies of the en-devour, ultimately within a few hours I was able to get all of the Render Farm Slaves to communicate properly with the Render Manager and actually bump out some fantastic render speed results. Throughout this process I had to troubleshoot several error codes from Maya/ Backburner that were very obscure and for which I found little support online. Each error made me permanently, slightly more insane. The feeling I got after conquering the errors is equatable to the feeling you get after a 12 hour day of manual labor in the desert sun (a great feeling of accomplishment and exhaustion.)

For a little background on the setup: The International Academy of Design and Technology, Las Vegas partnered with the producer of the film and supplied us with about 24 Alien Ware computers with Intel i7 Processors with a second room in the process of being upgraded and networked.

With 24 computers acting as slaves, at 1920x1080p we were able to finish about 120 frames in 40 minutes, averaging 3 minutes per render. This was with optimal rendering preferences (with the exception of motion blur and depth of field) and some pretty complex textures and lighting.

I just wanted to give an update and some insight to setting up a Maya, Mental Ray, Backburner render farm and I might put up a tutorial at a later time but for now if you are attempting such an adventure, my best piece of advice is:
1) to be patient with the error codes (don't pull your hair out, you will overcome)
2) refer to Autodesks documentation and make sure you go through each step like a checklist http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2014/en_us/index.html?url=files/GUID-788EB610-5A7E-41C4-BD0C-1099FB9E72AF.htm,topicNumber=d30e681735,
3) and make sure the same version of Backburner is on all machines!

If you need further assistance, you can contact me at jonakap1@gmail.com

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Tutorial: Using Backburner and Vray Distrubted Rendering in Perfect Harmony

Tutorial Brought to you by Jonathan Kaplan of Kaplan Design Labs

Hello internet world!

Disclaimer:

A) This tutorial pertains to 3D Artists.
B) You will already need a basic understanding of Vray Distributed Rendering and Backburner in order to understand this tutorial until I have time to make "word for word" steps and edits so anybody can understand this without the fundamental knowledge.

Background/ Why this tutorial is relevant:

I recently got a new job (which I am completely in love with.) I am now doing 3D Modeling, Rendering, Texturing, and Lighting full time, with a little illustration and graphic design mixed in. I was recently approached by my boss about setting up a render farm for the company to ease our workflow.  After comparing Mental Ray to Vray we decided as a company to use Vray as our primary render engine. This turned out to be a great decision in more ways than were immediately obvious. By going with Vray as our main render engine, we were able to benefit from Vray Distributed Rendering. For those of you who don't know, Vray Distributed Rendering in essence can use all the computers on a network to combine processing power and work on rendering a single frame. This is different from Backburner in the sense that traditionally, Backburner assigns a single frame to a single computer on a network (so if you have 20 computers on a network and 20 frames to render, each computer will render 1 frame at a time rather then combining forces to render each frame together.) I enjoyed the benefits of Vray Distributed Rendering because I feel like I would rather have more finished frames when I come in the next day than having 20 frames all %50 completed. Also, using Distributed Rendering seems to exponentially speed up render time in general.

This is where the problem came into play. While Vray Distributed Rendering was our office's preferred method of using our network as a render farm, there is no out of the box Render Que for you to prepare projects and autonomously have them render one project after the other without having to sit there and hit render every time a frame was done; however, Backburner is known for having a built in Render Que where as you submit projects they wait in line and automatically are sent to free slaves/ nodes (unused computers) as they become available and finish jobs.

At this point I decided I would attempt to find a way to use the benefits of the power of Vray Distributed Rendering in conjunction with the Render Que and "Monitor" aspects of Backburner. My first instinct was to take to Google and search every forum I could to find a method for using Vray DR and Backburner together. To my surprise, this was IMPOSSIBLE. While there were rumors that new versions of Vray DR and Backburner could function together, there was no documentation or tutorial at all and no one in any forums seemed to have any insight on this.

Despite not being able to find anybody who had already tackled this complex issue, I decided to see if I could figure it out, and I DID :) Here I present to you the necessary steps for setting this up.

Tackling the Problem:

Before you get started, decide which computers you want accepting jobs/ frames from Backburner and which computers you want to use Vray DR to contribute to those machines using Backburner. For instance, I am using 4 computers to start/ accept jobs in Backburner, and 6 computers to just use Vray DR and contribute to the render speed of the 4 computers using Backburner.

1) Make sure 3DS Max, Backburner, and Vray are installed on all of your machines in the Render Farm. If you need to use the trial version of 3DS Max on your slaves/ nodes, this is okay, you do not need to have a working licence if you are just using the computers as slaves and it is perfectly legal.

2) On your main stations/ Manager Computers, In Vray, go to Settings > Distributed Rendering > Settings. Here you will add the IP Address of all the computers you wish to use to contribute to the Distributed Rendering. In this window it is also a good idea to check the save in future scenes box. Close out of this window and make sure Distribute Rendering is checked in the box.

3) ONLY on all the computers you want to contribute to Vray DR, go to Start > All Programs > Chaos Group > Vray Adv > Distributed Rendering > and right click on Launch Vray Spawner, and run this program as an ADMINISTRATOR. In the bottom right hand corner of the taskbar, a small Vray icon will appear. This step is finished at this point.

4) Now your stations should be setup for Vray Distributed Rendering. This is where it gets a little tricky. Only on the computers that you wish to accept frames/ jobs from Backburner, Go to Start > All Programs > Autodesk > Backburner, and click on the Server button. Repeat on the other Backburner Machines. On your command station ( the machine you will use to distribute/ submit jobs ), Go to Start > All Programs > Autodesk > Backburner and click on Manager. These two programs should automatically recognize the network.

5) Now, With Backburner "Server" Open on half your machines ( or however you wish to distribute them ) and half your machines running the "Vray Distributed Rendering Spawner," you are now ready for a test render. Until you get the hang of it just test it on 1 or 2 jobs. Submit a job via Backburner from your command station and if everything is setup right, you will notice that the Backburner Slaves should have the computers with Vray Spawner open contributing to the machines that have Backburner "Server" open. In this way, you are now benefiting from the Render Que and Distribution that Backburner is great for, and your frames are getting done twice as fast by bringing Vray Distributed Rendering into the equation.

This should complete the basic steps of setting up Vray Distributed Rendering to work with Backburner. I will work on a video tutorial and add pictures/ edits to this tutorial as I get more time but for now I wanted to share this with the world.

If you have any specific questions or concerns feel free to leave me a comment.

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