I'm wondering if it's possible to use/make a rendering farm for the Apprentice edition(I have the Indie paid version).
In the license it says that I can use it for demo purposes and such, and well, I'm thinking about making a free renderfarm (As in free software) to cut down on my rendering time.

Is this possible?
There is no way I can shell out 8K for the master edition and then extra for the batch version to make a renderfarm..

What's an Indie paid version - you you mean Apprentice HD?

Anyway, the terms of the apprentice programs are shown here [sidefx.com], one mantra license.
Cheers,

J.C.

Yes, that's the version I mean.
I know there's just one Mantra token included.
Your reply simply didn't answer my questions at all XD

What I mean is, is it possible to plug in an external renderer?
If so, can someone point me to a decent one that is possible to use for a simple farm?

Hi

It is not possible to use another renderer with the apprentice HD edition.

regards

Erik

Ok, then I know.
Thanks for the reply

And now I feel stupid. Hey, someone should have said “RTFM”.
I just looked again, and now I did see that third party rendering is not possible/allowed.

Ok, so next question anyway then, is it possible to build a small renderfarm using the batch-version/just more mantra tokens?

Well, as the link says, one mantra token. Not without purchasing mantra tokens, no.

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1014&Itemid=267 [sidefx.com]

Cheers,

J.C.

Yeah, I knew that, but are there other limitations other then the tokens that would stop me from doing it?

Trenatos
Yeah, I knew that, but are there other limitations other then the tokens that would stop me from doing it?

Basically to use a farm you need:
1)
- Houdini license valid for exporting ifds files on disk: Escape, Master, hbatch
plus
- Mantra tokens, one per machine (or ideally per core)

2)
- One Houdini license (including HD) per every node.

No other limitations I can see here (except license agreement of noncommercial work)

skk.

I just had another look at the FAQ, and it states that I can make a renderfarm by purchasing more Apprentice HD versions. (One per box).

New question, can someone point me to a place with instructions on how to set that up in a network?
I'm assuming the way to go about it differs from how one would normally do it.

There are some wiki's on odforce for setting up remote rendering. Bottom line is to start up hserver on all the machines and then submit the renders with mantra using the -H switch and specifying the ip's or host-names.

Pagefan
There are some wiki's on odforce for setting up remote rendering. Bottom line is to start up hserver on all the machines and then submit the renders with mantra using the -H switch and specifying the ip's or host-names.

Could be wrong but this won't work on HD I suppose…

You need to setup renderfarm manager capable to send arbitrary command to remote machines. Command is simple hbatch script, that reads a hip file and render directly from that to disk.

Actually if you want to render your *private* project this way I wouldn't bother to much with it. Assuming 10 machines on farm it's much easier to setup trusted ssh connection and execute some custom script which fire up hbatch. If you want to render on more machines I would consider buying Escape which will allow you to work in professional way.

Yes, at the moment this is for private projects.
But it's also sort of, preparing for the future. I might be getting some gigs as an animator/modeller/visual effects, and then I'm getting the proper commercial licenses (As of now, I'm not doing any work commercially, of course.)

Well, I guess I'll have to dig through some Wiki's, unless someone who's done this before with one HD apprentice license per machine can help me out with directions.

Thanks for all the replies

I can think of a very good reason to do a farm with HD. Mantra still likes to crap out on extensive renders with multicore processors. A farm pulls up mantra, renders a single frame then closes it and then does it again. If mantra crashes, the farm would just resubmit. When it crashes when you render from the GUI, you have to kill the mantra in task manager, then restart it again from the frame it died. With a farm you would not have to babysit the render to make sure it didn't crash. Supposedly this was fixed with 9.2, but not completely. Would not show up in industry because they all use farms. That's my two bits.

Grav
:evil:

Just read this thread and since it's largely unresolved, I figured I'd bump it.

I'm also looking at the possibility of buying a few apprentice HD nodes and net rendering for a short film my friends and I are looking to put together.

But I just started looking at Houdini and don't really know how it works. We would like to use a render manager (Smedge or DrQueue come to mind), but I keep hearing of this need to export a “net render” format for each frame before they can be rendered over a network? What's that all about? Is it similar to Renderman's RIB?

That sounds like an incredible waste of time for a small project. Not to mention it probably makes it impossible to use Apprentice for net rendering.

Isn't there just some way to make Houdini just load the .hipnc file and render it directly for each machine on the network? That's how most other apps handle things.

If you have an escape or master license you can render directly to other machines. mantra -H hostnames etc…..

rendering to rib or ifd is better (for many reasons) than opening a hip file and rendering from there…

if you have a project that you intend to make using Houdini Apprentice HD, the best thing to do would be to contact SESI ( info@sidefx.com )
and tell them what you're up to and ask for their specific guidelines and assistance. (and maybe SESI can include this kind of info on the Apprentice HD faq)

thanks for the info archtor.

On a completely unrelelated note, i noticed you are a character TD at Core (i'm an observant person, you see).

Do you have any recommendations as to what some of the best available training is for character rigging Houdini? I've noticed very sparse available training on the subject.

Thanks!

yeah there isn't much out there….
3DBuzz has a series:
Houdini Advanced Character Rigging (I and II)
http://www.3dbuzz.com/xcart/product.php?productid=71&cat=11&page=1 [3dbuzz.com]

I haven't seen them so I can't honestly review them…but I've seen lots of the 3DBuzz stuff in the past and I rate them very highly.
the only other way really is to just give it a go and learn while you're doing it…experience in rigging in Maya or XSI etc will be useful of course…it's all the same thing really - just differnet names for things, buttons to press etc…
and you'll get lots of help here and at www.odforce.net [odforce.net]