Hi Angus:
Our school uses Muster which actually just runs mayaBatch (or
render.exe, whichever you like) rendering from a pre-specified template
that we provide it (e.g. render -r mr <scene.ma>), and I've found it to
be a lot easier to work with than going through exporting to a .mi file
(which for my film project took a LOOONG time per scene, and I'd have to
keep running my script to re-export those files every time we updated
the animation), plus it solves a lot of issues that come with rendering
via the GUI. I have no idea about how licensing would work in this case,
but I can try to ask the IT department here if you'd like. I'm pretty
sure we have a site-wide license for the school, though.
But yea, I would stick with mayaBatch. It doesn't actually launch the UI
to render, so it's essentially for all intents and purposes the same as
going through Mayatomr...but without the hassle of dealing with
exporting to .mi files as well. I'm not a true render wrangler, so if
anyone else has anything to add (why the hell is .mi export so slow, for
instance :P ), I'd love to be corrected on this!
Yours sincerely,
Siew Yi Liang
On 4/14/2014 2:05 PM, Matt Lind wrote:
The standalone is much more efficient than when run from a 3D
application. This does translate to noticeable performance
differences. Each 3D app exposes a different subset of mental ray’s
capabilities – there are some useful features for job control that
aren’t available from the GUI, for example. Your ability to render
will be constrained by the number of 3D licenses you have available
and installed. Render licenses usually cost significantly less than 3D
licenses which should allow you to expand your render capabilities to
keep your user workstations free and uncluttered – which is valuable
at the end of each course when students are rushing to get their
projects done. If you’re worried about students pushing the wrong
buttons to screw things up, you can make a simple scripted GUI to
launch the standalone with the desired flags, or use something like
royal render which his very cost effective.
With regards to #2, the same translation happens whether you use the
standalone or the GUI. When you run the render from the GUI, it
competes for memory and resources with the 3D application. Less of an
issue now that everything is running 64 bit raising the ceiling on
your resources, but the problem is still there if your computers are
not well equipped. You’ll likely want to dump logs to track what the
renderer is doing to track jobs and troubleshoot when things go
wrong. If you render from the GUI that means that information is only
available in the softimage script log (or Maya). If softimage crashes
or is restarted, you’ve lost your logs. The process of logging in
softimage takes longer compared to writing directly to STDOUT from a
shell using the standalone, and can direct output to a centralized
location so all your applications feed the same pool of logs which can
be inspected/managed by the renderfarm manager.
Rendering from the GUI may be less hassle to activate, but it will
render slower, be more difficult to troubleshoot when things go wrong,
and be constrained by the number of workstations you have available.
Matt
*From:*softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com
[mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Sven
Constable
*Sent:* Monday, April 14, 2014 1:15 PM
*To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
*Subject:* RE: Mental Ray Standalone
Hi Angus,
I never touched the MR standalone route in depth, because of two things:
1. It needs extra standalone- licenses. And therefore will cost
probably more than a few RR licences (I don't know if there are
educational versions for MR standalone, however)
2. The export takes a decent amount of time and disk storage,
depending on the scenes complexity (one file per frame and in general
not very comfortable nor even idiot save ;). And students are lazy
people right? Making every fuckup possible with sending their scenes).
Regarding the five batch render licences that comes with every
Softimage seat and the ability to use also satellite rendering within
the farm (the bugs with satellite rendering were fixed by mental
images several versions back), seems to me as a smarter route than
using standalone MR. Getting satellite rendering to work with
Royalrender is not supported out of the box but doable. I had a talk
with Holger Schoenberger a while ago when I set up a farm using
satellite rendering.
http://www.binaryalchemy.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2291 That was more
about security issues and to have it fully automated inside the
production pipeline. But maybe useful.
As mentioned, I have not really any experiences in using standalone MR
in production because I dropped it to the reasons stated above.
sven
*From:*softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com
<mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com>
[mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] *On Behalf Of *Angus
Davidson
*Sent:* Monday, April 14, 2014 12:46 PM
*To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
<mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com>
*Subject:* Mental Ray Standalone
Hi All
This year will be the last year we will be using Softimage for our
main 3d animation course. ;( For the shift to Maya next year for this
course (and for our 4th year course starting in july) our Lecturer
wants to go back to using Mental ray as the main renderer. (not my
first choice)
To that end I need to set up a render farm that will be compatible
with MR in Softimage 2014 and Maya 2015.
Currently I Can just install the apps on render farm machines and look
into something like royal render to wrangle that.
Alternatively I can get them to export to .MI2 files and use the
standalone render. (This has the benefit of allowing to use Mac OSX
instead of boot camping)
While I have had great luck taking a similar approach in Arnold using
.ass files I have never used Mental ray standalone.
Anyone had good / bad experiences going the standalone route for
mental ray?
Kind regards
Angus
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