Distributed rendering

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Distributed rendering is a feature that allows you to use multiple computers to render an image or an animation. Distributed bucket rendering (DBR) is a mental ray feature also known as Satellite Rendering that will use multiple computers to render one common image (in contrast to Backburner, which will normally have multiple computers rendering multiple frames, assigning one frame to just one machine).

Contents 1 Special features known to work with DBR 2 Special features known NOT to work with DBR 3 Backburner and DBR 4 How to share 3rd party mr shaders on a renderfarm

Special features known to work with DBR

• Final Gather is correctly computed on multiple machines
• (What about precalculating fg or photon maps?)

Special features known NOT to work with DBR

• Physical SSS will produce incorrect results when used with DBR

Backburner and DBR

Backburner works with Distributed Bucket Rendering (DBR), also known as Satellite Rendering, having the advantage that you can have multiple machines on your render farm rendering on the same frame AND still have your workstation free for work AND use Backburner as a queue.

To get this working, you need to edit the max.rayhosts file in the mentalray subdirectory on one machine A in the farm to which you will be submitting the backburner job. To this file, you add the names/IP addresses of other machines B, C, D... that should serve as satellite nodes, in total up to 8 CPUs.

You then activate the 'Distributed Render' option in your scene (the list of nodes does not matter) and submit your render job using the 'Net Render' option. You then assign only machine A to the job, which will then trigger machines B, C, D... for satellite rendering. Of course, you need to save the rendered image, as the result will not be displayed on an Virtual Frame Buffer.

--MartinB 13:35, 19 August 2007 (PDT)

How to share 3rd party mr shaders on a renderfarm

If you run a render farm, you might want to have one common network folder in which you store all custom MR shaders and from which all render nodes read the shader details. Then you only need to add/modify files in one location and all render nodes are immediately updated.

Here's how to do it with 3ds max 9:

• In the mentalray subdirectory, there is a satellite folder that has a separate rayrc file
• Add the UNC network path of your common folder to that file
• Make sure the mental ray satellite service has the right PERMISSIONS to access the network path (or run it with some special user)!!!

--MartinB 13:35, 19 August 2007 (PDT)

Also check out the LAmrUG server tips