Mini Maya Render Farm

[mdw]

Hey everyone. Newbie here. Thanks in advance for any help.

We are running maya 6.5 on macs and we recently have been surpassing our rendering capacity . So, we bought a bunch of machines to build a lil' render farm.

I was told by Alias phone support that registration/dongles etc are not required to do command line renders. We just need the to have the render executable and supporting files on the linux box. He also told me that we could use our mac maya CD to install Maya's renderer on linux, or that we could copy the executables from Mac to Linux and they would work since they are both Unix based. Well, nothing is working. Not sure how to get the mac code to run on linux. Anyway, I have two questions:

1) If I have a Maya license and want to run the maya renderer on Linux, how do I get my hands on the linux renderer executable files?

2) What distro do you recommend? I'm leaning towards Suse 10 b/c it's free and well rated, but it does not seem to be officially supported by maya 6.5. Since we are not using the gui, I imagine compatibility problems will not as big an issue.

[deke-kincaid]

I think you misunderstood or miss heard him. When you buy maya, there is a cd for each version in the package. Linux, Windows and OSX cd's, all separate disks. The osx version will not run on linux.

Suse is supported btw:
http://www.alias.com/eng/support/maya/qual...a\_65\_linux.html

[mdw]

Thanks Beaker.

It turns out that the Maya 6.5 for Mac package we received only contained the Mac version. I called back Alias, and they told me that it should have contained all three, even though it was an educational purchase. The reseller is claiming that the mac vers only contains the mac CD ... ....After a lot of back'n forth, I have a feeling neither alias or the resller will send me the linux version.

So, now I'm stuck. Any ideas?

Neil

[stackman]

If you have registered your Maya software through Alias and your user account there, you should be able to login with it and download updates for either platform. This is true also for academic licenses. I'm surprised Alias did not make you aware of this.

By the way... who was your reseller? It sounds like they really gypped you. I'd like to know what resellers to avoid in the future.

[mdw]

I'll try that. I figured I could find updates on the Alias site, but not the core installers.

Thanks! I used journeyEd.com. I think they are the largest educational software retailer. I've never had problems with them before. When I last spoke to somebody, she said she was going to ask her supervisor and get back to my. No word so far.

[user_deleted]

QUOTE(neil h @ 02/09/06, 03:09 PM) [snapback]227953[/snapback]
I'll try that. I figured I could find updates on the Alias site, but not the core installers.

Thanks! I used journeyEd.com. I think they are the largest educational software retailer. I've never had problems with them before. When I last spoke to somebody, she said she was going to ask her supervisor and get back to my. No word so far.

JourneyEd.com is one of Alias (now owned by Autodesk) authorized resellers. After reviewing their site information regarding Maya purchases it's confusing that they list the educational version as dual platform with the logo for Windows and OSX, but not Linux (ie: the penguin called Tux). Why this is confusing is that in the commercial version of Maya there are seperate discs for each platform Windows, OSX and Linux. Since the company links to the Alias Maya system requirements which list Linux (Novell SUSE Linux & Red Hat Enterprise Linux) I'd be a little upset too if I paid for an educational license only to realize the reseller gave me one disc for one platform instead of the complete package as offered by Alias and other resellers.

[deke-kincaid]

QUOTE(neil h @ 02/09/06, 03:09 PM) [snapback]227953[/snapback]
I'll try that. I figured I could find updates on the Alias site, but not the core installers.
The point updates include the full installers. They just don't include the docs.