I read the docs and I just want check if I understood right, The only way to have behavior similar to for eg. backburner in max, is to use alfred (pRman) as a server/manager for distributed renderings? And if it is, is there a plan to incorporate some kind of mantra render manager in future? It could ease a lot of things for small studios that have small render farms.

We use Sun Grid Engine here, works great(and is free). However, I like customization, it involves writing your own scripts, which I'd rather do rather than rely on a prepackaged approach. A render farm manager by definition needs to be a flexible thing, though. Most of the packages I've run into support houdini, or can support it. Some out of the box, most by writing a small script. The process of houdini is very straightforward like most packages - either hbatch or a houdini session spits out an IFD, same in nature as a RIB, and mantra can execute it. Distributing that process on a farm or grid is reasonably trivial, as always it just depends on how feature-laden you want that process to be. Some ppl will probably chime in with other options.

Cheers,

J.C.

nothing much to add except that you could also try drqueue as manager. Free as well and does support houdini too.

Thanks,
I guess I will have to try drqueue… sunGrid is (un)fortunately non-windows based, and our render farm is windows based because of 3dsmax…

Another question is is there a way to check activity of render farm computers (other then remote desktop connection) when I do mantra -h host1… command?

The ‘mantra -h’ syntax is an extremely basic approach to running a mantra on more than one cpu, it's not intended to be a render farm. You can right click over the tab of a pane and change to the render scheduler, that will probably tell you what's going on, although I'll admit I don't personally use it with our local setup.

Yeah, SGE does run on windows now, but it wouldn't be my first choice for an all-windows shop.

Cheers,

J.C.

any suggestion for windows based farm then?

Well, obviously I'll let windows users chime in, there was one back a bit in the thread. I've heard Rush [seriss.com] is pretty good. I'd google for more.

Cheers,

J.C.

djorzgul
any suggestion for windows based farm then?

Rush from what I've heard is pretty robust. Drqueue works fine although is really buggy on windows. You can also try Deadline from Frantic films, which works also pretty well. The one thing I really don't like with 3rd party render queue managers is that they never support recent version of the software. and what is most annoying the ROP for sending jobs to queue is obsolete. Personally I would recommend different way to go. Since introducing python in H9 you can write simple rendering distribution tool yourself, using a little bit of python and PYRO (Python Remote Object). Have a look at pyro website where you can find quite a few similar examples.

cheers
kuba

Hi all,

We have a page for queues here:
http://odforce.net/wiki/index.php/RenderQueues [odforce.net]

…if anyone has experience on any of them, please share : )

Defitinely Deadline from Frantic films s the best windows based renderfarm I have used.
I have just finished a project where everything have been rendered using it.
In their commercial distro their support for Houdini was old, but after a couple of emails with them we received a nue beta version of a Mantra plugin for Deadline that owrks really well.
No doubt ask to them their suport for Mantra 7,8 and 9 is pretty good but I think that haven't publish the ppluging in the commercial version yet.
Also they are preparing the next release that will have a better support for houdini, and even a linux and mac versions.
I was surprised that could be so good renderfarm applications in Windows.