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Do I say it?  Will it just break down once I mention it?  Anyhow, I am extremely excited and grateful to say, the render farm is working!  Bob and I got it to a place today where I can render out complete scenes.  This is exciting!  I have already rendered out a homework assignment in HD in around an hour that would have taken much, much longer had I done it on a single machine.

This does not mean that all our problems are gone, however.  I currently have the RenderPal client configured properly on eight out of thirty machines in one of the labs.  This will not be hard to fix, however, since I already know what needs to be done.  Also, output is still not going to the intended location, but I at least know where it is going and can relocate files as needed.  The renderers are still extremely picky about textures, so I imagine that there will be issues once students actually start rendering and realize that there file mappings are sometimes mixed up.  That should not be too difficult to work out though.

Next week, I hope to reconfigure the machines, or else at least write some scripts to help me with the configurations!

Andrew

3.5 hours

Ok, so perhaps mass deployment is not an accurate description of what I actually did last week, but it felt like it!  For the first hour, I went to the Loew-Brenn classroom and edited several settings on about ten machines, necessary to get things to render properly.  I have known about those changes for some time, but I just got around to editing them at this point.  The main changes that I made included turning off Deep Freeze (so that the changes would be saved), supplying credentials for the render shares, specifying another network drive for shaders, and ensuring that the render service would restart if it were accidentally killed.  Also, I had to update the credentials for a couple of services that did not seem to be starting properly.

After that, I took an extremely simple animated scene that I had created and tried to render it, but I still ran into the issues of specifying the proper output directories.  It seems that there are still some major permissions issues, but I still have not figured them out completely.

I am hoping that maybe we can get some time this week to just sit down and really examine where we need to go next.  I still have around twenty computers to reconfigure in Loew-Brenn, as well as obtaining proper output for a single animation.

Andrew

2 hours

I re-exported the Maya files this week, using the simpler project files instead of the shader-heavy versions.  This helped immensely, but there were still a couple of errors that were produced that did not really effect the output.  I was receiving output, but still with the frame numbering issue.  By the end of the time I spent on the project, I thought I was going to get numbered frames, but there were other issues that prevented the renderer from writing files out.  Frustrating!

I think my next plan of action is to create an extremely simple scene, export it, and then get it to render.  This should be fairly straightforward with what I already know.  Then, I plan to try to get the numbered frames to work.  After that, if I have any time left (or the next week) I will work on ironing out the shader links.  I have several students who are waiting to put some work through the render farm whenever it is operational, so there is a little more pressure on getting this operational (not that there was no pressure before…).

Thanks for reading!

Andrew

2 hours

Well, I somehow forgot to post a blog two weeks ago for this MentalRay study.  Looking back, that was a fairly busy weekend because of Fall Work Day, the Lake Sno-Tip birthday party (and helicopter entrance!), and so on.  Regardless, I have now the opportunity to remedy the situation!

Generally, I did much of the same tasks that I had been doing.  However, I was finally able to render to and from the servers, but I was unable to increment the filename for successive frames.  The files just kept getting overwritten.  I tried many different output options, changing the filename, output location, file type, and so on, but nothing seemed to help.  Although I got output, I could only get one frame.  I did try re-exporting the Maya file, but I used a complex project that ended up having many shader issues.  There is nothing like being sidetracked by additional issues.

More to come based on the following week’s endeavors…

Andrew

4 hours

So I was able to obtain images from MentalRay directly last week.  This was encouraging, because I was starting to wonder if that was even possible anymore.  The downside is that I was doing this fairly manually since RenderPAL does not seem to be fully configured.  Anyhow, I have learned quite a bit about working with MentalRay directly, which could definitely come in handy with future configurations.

My time was essentially spent working from the ground on up with MentalRay.  I started with just running the ray command.  After this worked, I tried rendering a scene locally.  When this worked, I tried rendering a project that was hosted on the server.  When THAT worked, I tried rendering a file OUT to the server.  I had some issues with this, but I was finally able to render out to a different server.  I also found that RenderPAL was outputting an improper string to initiate the rendering, but I have not figured out how that can be fixed yet.

Supposedly I will be getting a project soon that needs to be rendered out, but we will have to see how far I can get with the back-end programs.

Andrew

2 hours