Satellite Rendering Woes

[user_deleted]

Has anyone played with the satellite rendering at all?

We've set it up here, and I've tested it pretty extensively, so I know the connections all work and everything, but I found one really really bad problem:

If one of the machines hangs on a frame, the entire render will just stop!

At least that's the experience I've had so far.

I set off a render using our shiny new satellite setup and was all hopeful I'd see some sort of time savings, but I came in today to check on it, and it apparently rendered for about 45 minutes and just stopped. No errors, no CPU action, nothing.

My only guess is something happened in the network to cause a hiccup in the connection for just long enough to hang the node. Apparently, since this is tiled images and not true distributed rendering, the master machine will just patiently wait for the slave to return it's little chunk of the image regardless of how long it takes.

I was so hopeful we'd be able to have some modest relief from our rendering troubles, but I guess that's not to be.

Since it's Sunday, I can't get in touch with support, so I'm just hoping someone out there might have a solution for me . . .

[jake42]

hey i am having a very similar issue with maya 6.5 and mental ray satellite rendering. did you ever find a solution with your setup? thanks,
~jake

[user_deleted]

The solution I found was to not use satellite rendering. There's no failsafe if a node crashes as far as I can tell.

I've resorted to rendering over the network via batch rendering. It's not centralized, so you need to manually start each machine, but it's reliable.

Someone made a utility for XSI batch rendering to give you some centralized control, but I don't have the link right now. I don't know if Maya offers the batch render option like XSI or not, but if you know mel script you could probably figure something out.

Sorry if this is of no help

Good Luck!

[richard-sher]

If you've got the time to set it up, XSI comes with a program called batchserve. It won't help you with your satellite rendering, but it will give you centralized control over rendering on your other machines.

[user_deleted]

I was under the impression you had to pay for a batchserve license to use it, plus added money for each machine you will be rendering on. We don't have a budget, so we're just using the nodes that come with Advanced.

If that's not the case, I may look into setting that up.

[richard-sher]

You don't have to pay for a batchserve license. The clients and servers are all free. I don't know how many mental ray licenses Advanced comes with that batchserve can control though. (Ask Softimage about that one.)