MR baking over network

Maya
1

Hi there, does anybody here know if it is bossible to distribute the baking of textures and lighting across multiple maya nodes on a network ?
I've not found a solution and to be honest I doubt that this is possible , but I thought I'd ask anyway

Paulus Bannink
3D-Artist
Guerrilla-Games
Amsterdam

2

convertLightmap -mi -f (filename) wich creates a mi file that can be rendered by commandline, in mental ray.
I have not triet network rendering it so I cant promise that it will work.

3

thanks for your reply, as soon as I have Time I'll give it a try and let you know.

Paulus Bannink
3D-Artist
Guerrilla-Games
Amsterdam

4

Just a little more detail on the lightmap command
convertLightmap -mi -f (filename) (shadingGroup) (object);
convertLightmap -mi -f myfilename initialShadingGroup pSphere;

5

as long as you have a rayhosts file setup, you can bake out to several machines at once. What will happen is each shader/object will use a different machine. This can be done both while in maya or from the command line.

Also, within maya, you can add rayhosts by using : Mayatomr -ah MACHINE

Where MACHINE either is the IP address or hostname. To make sure a machine is added use the Mayatomr -lh command to list the hosts

6

I've come to understand that this will only work if the slave machines have mentalray standalone, am I correct ?

7

I'm not sure. I don't think it should really matter as long as the MRay service is running on the other machines (they will be listening for any incoming messages to the MRport#)