Understanding Network Rendering


When you use network rendering to render your animation, Max divides the work among several machines connected via a network, with each machine rendering some of the frames. The increase in speed depends on how many machines you can devote to rendering frames: Add just one computer, and you double the rate at which you can render. Add seven or eight machines, and instead of missing that important deadline by a week, you can get done early and take an extra day off.

The price of all this (besides the extra machines) is a time investment on your part. It does take a little work to get things set up properly, but it's an investment that you have to make only once. If you take the time now to make sure that you do things right, you should be up and running fairly quickly and have far fewer headaches down the road.

Machines connected to handle network rendering are often referred to collectively as a rendering farm. The basic process during a network rendering goes like this: One machine manages the entire process and distributes the work among all the computers in the farm. Each machine signals the managing computer when it is ready to work on another frame. The manager then sends or "farms out" a new frame, which gets worked on by a computer in the rendering farm, and the finished frame gets saved in whatever format you've chosen.

The software in Max that makes network rendering possible is called Backburner. You may have noticed that it was installed when Max was installed. Max has several features to make the network rendering process easier. If one of the computers in your rendering farm crashes or loses its connection with the manager, the manager reclaims the frame that was assigned to the down computer and farms it out to a different machine. You can monitor the status of any rendering job you have running, and you can even have Max e-mail you when a job is complete.

In this chapter, we step through the process of setting up network rendering on a small network. You find out firsthand what's involved so that setting up your own network can go smoothly.

Note 

One additional caveat to using network rendering is that you have no guarantee that the frames of your animation will be rendered in order. Each participating computer renders frames as quickly as possible and saves them as separate files, so you cannot use network rendering to create .AVI or .MOV files. Instead, you have to render the scene with each frame saved as a separate bitmap file, and then use Video Post or a third-party program (such as Adobe Premiere) to combine them into an animation file format such as .AVI.




3ds Max 9 Bible
3ds Max 9 Bible
ISBN: 0470100893
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 383

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