Mental Ray for Maya Satellite

Deadline
1

Hi,



Can someone tell me the process for configuring “Mental Ray for Maya Satellite” in Deadline. I have Maya Unlimited 7.0.1. That provides me with 8 Mental Ray Satellite licenses to be used for network rendering from inside Maya. How can I utilize this feature in Deadline when distributing render jobs.



Cheers,



Abhi.

2
  1. Choose a satellite master machine, then modify the maya.rayhosts of the that machien so that it uses the slaves you want.


  2. Only put the master in deadline, the slave should not have the deadline slave running.


  3. Submit a job to deadline, make sure that the job will be picked-up by the master machine you have setup. Use pools to do so.


  4. In the job property page of the Maya job, in the Maya tab, you could add the following line in the additional arguments field : -rnm 1



    This -rnm 1 means “render no master true” that will force the master not to participate to the rendering but only submit and receive the render tasks. You will get better results this way.



    You could also use “render no master false” -rnm 0 and force 1 cpu on the master(if your master is a dual cpu) so you have 1 cpu free on the master to dispatch the task.



    In short you should always have 1 cpu free on the master machine for dispatching or else your render time will suffer.



    Hope this helps.



    Sylvain Berger | Technical Director | Alpha Vision


3

Hey Sylvain,



Thanks for your reply. Makes a lot of sense. Let me try it out and get back to you.



Big help…much appreciated.



Anyways, i got to see one of your architechtural walkthrus, i think it was the Hudson one. Great job.



Cheers,



Abhi.

4

Good luck with it. We had some excellent and some really bad results with satellite.



Rendering a scene with lots of photons doesn’t always work well with satellite.



Sylvain Berger | Technical Director | Alpha Vision


5

Hey man,



something really funny’s happening. When i fire a render job, it’s picking up Satellite and even starts the job. But after rendering a few frames it just stops rendering…it shows that it’s still rendering, but even after hours there are no new frames in the images folder.



My scene’s very simple, i just have a ball bouncing inside a polygon dome and rendering it with default FG. If i batch render it from inside Maya, satellite’s working just fine.



Any idea what’s going on…???



Abhi.

6

One thing we have found that causes satellite to behave like you are describing is the Verbose. Using a high verbose mode often do that, the render jam un definitly.



By using a low verbose mode, you see this less often.



The other thing that I have seen that can cause that is some somes that are shooting photons. All the scenes I have tested that didn’t work well where using photons.



Try creating your photon map, then re-use the photon map with your satellite setup.



Apart from that… satellite seems to have a mind of it’s own some times … one day it will increase your render time 500%, the next day it will slow it down by 200%.



Good luck.



Sylvain Berger | Technical Director | Alpha Vision


7

Man this sucks…actually, why i am complaining is cause we are testing this MRSAT feature with Deadline for our clients…and we need to provide this as a render farm solution for Studios using Maya. The reason i wanna suggest Deadline is cause you can’t exclude the server from rendering from inside Maya.



But using deadline, you can, like you suggested earlier. I can’t suggest this to clients if it’s not reliable. Ofcourse, i can suggest them to buy Mental Ray standalone licenses for their render farm at the risk of being kicked out of their studio…:D:D:D



To tell you the truth, everyone’s using Mental Ray for rendering and they really need a reliable Render Manager. Hope you understand, i can’t ask them to spend so much money to buy seperate render licenses for Mental Ray when their is already MRSAT inbuilt in Maya.



Your workarounds are preety interesting…and i’ll try them out…but MRSAT not being reliable is very uncomfortable. Believe me everything that can go wrong, does go wrong when i am testing things at the client’s place…ha ha ha…so i don’t wanna be half prepared.



Any words of Wisdom will be appreciated…Thanx a lot.



Abhi.

8

First, it is possible to remove the master when using Satellite from the Maya interface.



Go in the option box of the Render > Render current Frame and click off render on this machine. Alternatively you can check on render on this machine and set the number of cpu to (TotalNumberOfCpu - 1)



The problem with Satellite is not Deadline or any distributed rendering software… I really think it is Mental Ray itself.



For example, killing a Satellite slave while it is rendering will hang the render forrever… it is like satellite doesn’t consider lot connections.



I really hope that the next Mental Ray version in Maya 8 will have some Ssatellite fixes.



Sylvain Berger | Technical Director | Alpha Vision


9

First, it is possible to

remove the master when using

Satellite from the Maya

interface.





Duh…that’s why it’s always good to talk to someone who uses Maya…sometimes it’s right in front of me and i can’t see it…thanx…any idea how to do this for batch rendering…???



I totally agree with u on the issues u r facing with MRSAT…same here…



Anyways, Quick Q - one of my client’s asked me if it is possible to fire jobs from deadline to specific CPUs on a slave machine…let’s say i have a slave with 2 CPUs and i want to send 1 frame to 1 CPU and the second to the other…if yes…kindly enlighten…:smiley:



Abhi.