I'm working as IT engineer, so far, don't know much about Combustion! Except that it's working fine on standalone station.
We got heterogeneous stations (Mac OSX and W2K) running Combustion. Actually these stations get frames and send back composited results into servers, it's well suited for the actual production pipeline.
But today, we would like to enhance the pipe and offer Combustion an access to the renderfarm (just a part or the whole), which is dedicated to Maya and Shake process.
Question is: Does anyone know some great tools to centralize render jobs posted from OSX AND W2K? The renderfarm is W2K but could goes to Linux. May be, with the new AE 6.5, that AE stations would also go into a such centralized renderfarm rather than a dedicated one.
If, as miracle, one of those tool could handle all type of renders (Maya & Shake) without much developpement (I know I'm asking the most!), it would be fan-tas-tic!!! As far as I feel the thing, I'm almost sure it will be some command line tool, which it's fine for the renderfarm, but I need a graphical part on the stations to send jobs to the queue.
These allow for unattended rendering of multiple combustion workspaces, in multiple file formats, with multiple outputs per operator.
There are TWO free tools include with Combustion:
1) a Stand-alone "Render Queue" for network rendering, for both the MAC and Windows.
2) The powerful "Backburner" client-server network rendering system (Windows only.)
It sounds like you would use "Backburner"...
Here's your Workflow: First, properly configured your network and install backburner and components to ALL your renderfarm stations. After that, you are ready to submit workspaces as network rendering jobs. This process usually consists of the following steps:
Create a workspace that uses footage residing in a single shared, public folder.
Create a shared, public folder in which to deposit network rendering output (rendered files).
Point to these folders using the Input Folder and Output Folder fields in the Render Queue's Global Settings panel.
Start network rendering using backburner Manager and backburner Server applications.
Thanx for infos. You're right, Backburner will be the most interesting tool for Combustion, whether for Mac or PC. We could be familiar with the process because it's very similar to the "watch folder" of AE.
Beneath the Combustion solution, you may have noticed that the Renderfarm is actually dedicated to other software. Question is: I suppose Backburner is not able to handle Maya render jobs!!! So should I split my renderfarm into parts, one part for Combustion, other part for Maya & co?
Or is there a great tool which is able to manage any command line render job? Which is the case for all these softwares: Maya, Shake, Combustion, AE.
And, if yes, is a such tool provided with an OSX GUI and a Windows GUI for queueing jobs?
Until now, there's no possibility to handle development on this site. I'm trying to feel the frontier between: * expensive (but working well, but need developpers) tool like Pixar Alfred * a cute and less expensive tool (like Spider?)! * native render tools included with softs, but it leads to a splitted renderfarm.