Animation Render Farm

A render farm is used to divide the work of rendering among multiple machines. This year, we had a render farm consisting of 88 clients, with a maximum of 86 active concurrently.

A farm relies on software called Backburner, which is included with 3dsmax. To create a render farm, install 3d Studio and Backburner on a group of computers that are accessible to each other over a network. Designate one machine as the Manager. It will be used to distribute frames of an animation to one or more Servers. There is also a Queue Monitor tool that is used to show the status of Servers connected to a Manager, and the progress of a render job. Note that expired trial copies of 3d Studio are acceptable for use on a Server.

In the Server window, use Edit -> General Settings to select the Server and Manager. This dialog should appear automatically the first time the Server is started. For the Server, select the name or IP address of the local machine; for the Manager, that of the machine designated for that purpose. To enter the Manager, the Automatic Search check box must be unchecked. In the Queue Monitor, use Manager -> Connect to choose a Manager.

To use a render farm, select Rendering -> Render in 3d Studio. In the Render Output section, click the "Files..." button. Select a directory, file name and file format. Note that the directory must be accessible from all machines in the farm, or if a local directory, it must exist on all machines. The format must be BMP or similar; if AVI, MOV, etc., are used, the entire animation will be rendered by only one machine in the farm. Click the Net Render check box, then the Render button. This will bring up the Network Job Assignment dialog. Enter a unique job name. Uncheck Automatic Search, then enter the Manager name or IP address and click Connect. Then click Submit.

When using a render farm, keep the following points in mind:

If you are installing 3d Studio Max 2008 on a machine with an older version of Max, uninstall Backburner before installing Max 2008. Otherwise, the installer will skip Backburner. Older versions of Backburner will not work with Max 2008.

When 3d Studio is invoked by the render Server, it will not tolerate errors. When running 3d Studio interactively, if you see a dialog of the form "this is missing, continue/cancel", it will not net render. An error message will appear in the Server window and Max will shut down.

When creating an animation, keep in mind that the complete path to any image used as a texture will be recorded by 3d Studio. If the image is on a local hard drive, that file and the path to it will have to be created on each machine in the render farm. If you have multiple animators, you will have to assemble a complete collection of files from all of their machines (and hope there are no duplicates), then distribute them to all machines in the farm.

We kept all files for the animation on a file share, which was mapped to the same drive letter on each machine. If the file share is hosted on XP, be mindful of the limit on concurrent connections to that share.

The render Manager and Servers will not function properly if the machine name begins with 0-9. If you have such names, you will either have to get the network administrator to change them, or use IP addresses. If you use IP addresses, fixed addresses are preferable; if you use DHCP, the render farm will have to be reconfigured when the IP addresses change.

Thanks. Really concise explanantion of terminology