just wondering whether anyone used MR Satellite already... I did'nt really have the time to test thoroughly... it seems to work fine, but there are some issues.... first I've got the problem that once I rendered a frame in mayas renderview (distributing works fine) and continue working, after a while MR is hammering messages in my ouput window/terminal about servers not responding since x minutes, since it puts outs a new line of this message every second, this is really annoying and makes it impossible to check any other logs...
Second. I'm wondering about sequence rendering... will it render every single frame on all machines or is there a way to tell it to use one machine per frame (cause that seems way more efficent....)?
I think that one frame over all the machines is acualy faster. But , no I don't think right now you can, Mental ray staellite works as a parrelle render only if I recall. I could be wrong, I'm not going to start testing that for a few more weeks.
What is it with people nowdays, it just like theyve never actualy heard of a command shell before? Even tough they use it all day long (yes clicking things in windows gui is just launcing commandline commands even tough you dont se it)
Connect to your remote machine, i prefeer to use ssh2 for this because its secure and i can store the keys conviniently (and the machine i connect to does no allow any other connection 99% of time because teh distance of transfer can be quite wast). usualy in my case it looks something like this. offcourse both computers must have acces to files, if they share the filesystem no problem if not then just scp2 them over. (not normaly i just push the data to my render dispatcher but thets a different story)
now computer 1 starts at frame 0 and then hops to render frames 2 4 6 ...
and comp 2 starts at frame 1 and hops to render frames 1 3 5 7....
Whats exactly so hard about this? Offcvourse what you want to use depends on what sytem your on what connections you have available. Oh and allmost every dispatcher in the world does this for you automaticaly.
Sorry, but you're way off... before bitching around you could think abit... just for a change, ok. I do know to how to use ssh. And I logged in to our blades via a terminal probably more often than you could think of. With some help I actually managed to get DrQueue to do just what you described, before we had 6.5. However with 6.5 and satellite you get 8x as many rendering licenses as before and maybe it did not came to your mind but my question centred on all those issues how to use these (which unfortunately I can't test right now): if I batchrender (from maya or command line) and if it does use MR satellite, it might still distribute every frame I render on all machines available, regardless using the -b option, (which I know quite well btw.). If not using satellite I'd have much less licenses...
The entire point of satelite is to accelerate one frame rendertimes not to render many frames at once. Idea is that thisway you can cram much more detail in one frame at acceptable rendertimes. When the sepratae sub components can be rendered more on demand than before.
So ifd you want the old behaivour use the old way of dispatching, staelite want meant for dispatching tho old way.
Aslo yes you cant start more renderjobs in the new maya without letting it render the same frame on many machines. Thisn of it they gabve you more licences to render ONE JOB! Not multiple ones.
Otherwise you could misuse this fact new feature and gain more full separate job licences. So one satalite render is one process kindof but many subsequent farems would be many.
hmm no to my understanding the satelite policy comes form mental images, becasue even MAX users got this 8 extra satelite slave rendernodes if you may. Probably xsi comes next.
The idea is probably that theese nodes dont replace your renderffarrm needs but rether enable you to work with more complex scenes wich in th end leads to more sales because of needs for even bigger farms. Mr is just moving with the times, id asume irs a attack against pixars plans for cheaper prman lics.
I havn't got this to work at my first stab. I have it installed on a remote machine that I can ping and my workstation. what happens if someone else is working on something next to me and hits the render button and it starts using my machine? is this how it works? or do I not need satellite on my box, only the farm?
Satellite is waiting for requests on port 7103. As long as you haven't installed satellite on your machine, nobody else can use it for satellite renderings. Even if you had installed it on your computer, it's IP would still have to be listed in a maya.rayhosts file on this other persons machine or added manually with >Mayatomr -ah "IP:port"<. Only then he/she would be able to use your machine...
The bad thing about this maya.rayhosts file is that one can easily forget about it, thus using all the machines listed there for every render...
That's why I wrote a little MEL GUI where you can add / remove machines....