3DMAX: best Practice tips for power management?

Deadline
1

Since we actually have more render capacities dormant on our workstations than on our renderfarm we would like to introduce powermanagement to the working stations as well. On a dedicated rendermachine the powermanagement is set up pretty much straight forward but when people need to work on that computer at daytime it gets a bit more complicated. Hopefully someone could give me a hint on how to optimize this.

As far as i know the Deadline slave cannot be started remotely without a user logged in.
So for now i see two approaches to do this when a machine gets started by wake on LAN. Both methods have their pros and cons.

The first is to install the deadline client as a service which is provided with the login data of a generic rendering user.
The downside is, that when in the morning someone comes to work on this machine he or she would log in with their own username and password and could not tell if their machine is rendering without looking it up in the deadline monitor. Same goes for a slave starting up because of idle detection when someone takes a break. This would cause a lot of confusion i bet.
Also, and this is even more important, it would not be possible to see if the render will come out properly before its finished since max starts up without showing a VFB.

The second approach is to not install the deadline client as a service but have the computer automatically log on to a generic rendering User.
This would make it possible to see if and what is rendered on the machine but still the artist working on that machine would need to switch users both when they start their machine or to check ongoing renderings.

Did I miss something here? Any advice is very appreciated

2

You outlined the possible issues pretty well here. I’ll tell you what tends to work best:

  1. Launching the machine when someone goes on break:

This involves letting the Launcher start up the Slave when it detects the machine is idle and will get the most use of the machine at the cost of having the machine rendering when the user comes back. They’ll have to wait for the Slave to be closed by the Launcher when it detects they’ve come back. In this case, tile rendering is helpful so the whole frame doesn’t get lost.

docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produ … -ref-label

  1. Running the Slave on a schedule:

This is separate from power management and works best when the Launcher is running as a service because it requires no intervention. You can have the Slave start at 7:00pm and close at 6:00am and hopefully this will not interrupt on a regular day. You’re right that they wouldn’t know when it started.

docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produ … ection#id1

  1. Having users manually open the render user account

This can be tied in with the automatic login you mentioned, and it keeps control of rendering to the artist and they can choose when to start their machine on the farm. This is what we would do many years ago: When you’re done for the day, switch to the render user and allow it to be a resource for the farm. The benefit here is that if the artist needs their machine overnight they can make the choice to add themselves, the downside is some folks forget. If everyone has access to this account and someone forgets to log their machine in, another artist could log in for them.