blog

On Wednesday I gave a presentation to members of the campus community about my independent study on the renderfarm.  I was grateful to have individuals from Tech Services, the DMA Department, the Computer Science Department, and other areas in attendance.  In the presentation, I covered the basics of rendering computer graphics and how these principles were expanded into our renderfarm.  I then proceeded to cover the different tasks I completed as part of the independent study.  I finished up with a very productive question and answer session, with many helpful questions being raised.

I would like to thank Bob Landon for his assistance in completing this study, as well as Dr. Lehman for helping me to pursue this opportunity.  I look forward to continuing work on the render farm over J-Term and even into next semester.

Thanks for reading!
Andrew Martin

1 hour

53.5 hours total for the project

After about fifteen weeks working on the render farm, I believe that I am about done with this phase of the project.  Looking back at the original proposal for the project, I noticed how much has changed since the beginning of the semester.  From MentalQueue to sleeping render clients, it has been quite an adventure.  I also noticed how much has actually been accomplished.  First of all, I was able to get MentalRay to work with RenderPal, producing a somewhat automatically managed rendering environment.  With much help from Bob, we were able to configure network drives to connect to the shares required for the shaders and project files.  I also began development of a script to install MentalRay and RenderPal to client machines, along with setting environment variables and starting services.  I ran several of my projects through the render farm, including one that spanned several days.  I also taught a friend, who may be doing the render wrangling next semester, how to run the basics of the render farm.  Currently, I am sending several projects from the advanced 3D class through the render farm.

On Friday I spent most of the time on the render farm finishing up documentation, waking computers, troubleshooting why the MentalRay renderers were not working, and starting renders.  All last week and probably well into next week I will be working on setting up student renders and troubleshooting errors.  It seems that I have acquired the temporary role of render wrangler for the semester.

I will be giving my final presentation on Wednesday at 2:00 in Science Hall room 122.  Come then to see and hear more about this project!

Andrew

6 hours

Right before Thanksgiving break I was asked to present to the advanced 3D animation classes on how to properly format projects for the renderfarm.  I spoke for around half an hour for each class about the various steps required to optimize the Maya scenes, as well as how to export projects.  I had the students follow along so that they could see how to prepare their own projects for the renderfarm.  I think that the presentations went fairly well, and I was actually able to address some issues that I had not foreseen by following along with the twenty plus students through the process.

Unfortunately, I did not blog from two weeks ago (which was actually three weeks ago because of our Thanksgiving break).  However, I did not accomplish much that on Friday because of a server failure at Tech Services.  It was not that big of a deal, except for the fact that the renderfarm’s shaders were stored on the server that was the replacement server.  So I spent most of my time on the renderfarm that week cleaning up my scripting, organizing the render console, and remapping the render shaders folder.  i basically found that in order to remap the shaders, we just need to update the links in the rayrc file and put it on the machines that will be acting as render clients.  I have also found a tool that allows for remote command-line execution (using authentication) that could be helpful for pushing these somewhat small updates out.  The tool is not quite working yet, but I have been talking to Bob about it.

Professor Ballinger from the DMA department has asked me to present to his two advanced 3D Animation classes about how to prepare projects for the renderfarm.  In order to do that, I have been talking to him and Bob about the procedures surrounding the process.  Basically, we are discussing the specifics of how the render wrangler is notified of a job that a students wants rendered and the procedure of “waiting in line” for projects that are submitted as higher priority.  I think that this will be a procedure that really develops itself over the tenure of the first official render wrangler next semester.

Coming up next week… documentation!

Andrew

2 hours