Hello,
I wanted to ask if anyone has successfully seen, know or has deployed an automated, cross platform, font system across a render farm? I am doing some scope work to see if it’s feasible to have my After Effects designers there. The one issue I can foresee is font management.
We have a 20 node, Maya render farm running in conjunction with a Vray engine. The hardware is from Boxx Technologies with 12Gbs of RAM for each node & running Windows Server 2008 in terms of a operating system. Also, I am running Deadline 4.0 to render-wrangle. As for my After Effects users, they are all on Mac Pros running 10.6.3, so the solutions would need to be Mac/PC capable.
Besides the standard collections of fonts used, at any given time, my users may receive a job that requires a particular font. So, I 'd rather not install fonts twenty times across a farm. Though, from my experience & talking to a fellow technician, the only real way to get this done is manually. I thought I would just ask here. Hopefully, someone has come across this. Thanks.
Gerard
The problem is that windows does not automatically refresh it’s fonts directory when new font files are copied.
The solution is to open an explorer window on the slave showing the fonts directory, after the new files have been copied
here’s a scenario that I have running:
Create a folder on a network drive (e.g. Z:\FontsInstaller)
Create a subdirectory “Fonts” and copy all font files you want to distribute to the farm into this folder.
Create a bat file named “installfonts.bat” in Z:\FontsInstaller\ with the following content:
----------------file begin---------------------
xcopy Z:\FontsInstaller\Fonts* C:\Windows\Fonts\ /Y
explorer C:\Windows\Fonts
----------------file end---------------------
now you can select the slaves in Deadline Monitor and select “Remote Control -> Execute Command”
then in the Command box type Z:\FontsInstaller\installfonts.bat and press OK
As far as mixing Mac with Windows fonts, I can’t really help you, as I don’t have enough experience with Macs.
Hope this has been helpful.
Good luck!
Wim Wouters
Creative Conspiracy