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Figure 45-5: Mapping the Z drive to point to \\dungar\scenes\.

To set up your shared directories, follow these steps:

1.First, decide which drives to use and then share them. On my network, Dungar has plenty of disk space, so I used the maps, images, and scenes directories that were already there from when I installed Max.

Tip	Use the maps, images, and scenes directories for all the scenes that you render via a net-
	work. In each directory, you can create other directories to organize files for your different
	scenes, but putting all needed files in the same place facilitates maintenance.

2.On each computer in your rendering farm, map a drive to your shared maps, images, and scenes directories as described in the previous section. If possible, choose the same drive letters on all machines. I used the letter Z for the maps directory on each computer.

Congratulations! You’ve made it through the installation and setup of your network rendering system. And no matter how long it took you, it was time well spent. The ability to render via a network will easily save you more time than you invested in setting up your network.

Starting the Network Rendering System

You can finally put all your hard work into action. We’re ready to start up your network rendering system.

Tutorial: Initializing the network rendering system

The very first time you start your rendering farm, you need to help Max do a little initialization.

To initialize the network rendering system, follow these steps:

1.Start the network manager on one machine in your rendering farm. This program, Manager.exe, is in the backburner2 directory. You can start the manager by selecting it

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and pressing Enter in Windows Explorer. After it starts up, you first see the backburner Manager General Properties dialog box. This dialog box appears only the first time you run the Manager.exe program or if you choose Edit General Settings. I cover its settings later in the chapter. After setting these properties, click the OK button, and the Manager window, shown in Figure 45-6, runs.

Figure 45-6: Starting the network manager

2.Now start a network server on each computer that you plan to use for rendering. To do this, find and start the Server.exe program just like you did with Manager.exe. When you start this program for the first time, the backburner Server General Properties dialog box appears. This dialog box is covered later in the chapter. Click OK, and the Network Server window appears, as shown in Figure 45-7.

Figure 45-7: Starting a network server. Notice that the server is already looking for the manager.

When the server finds the manager, it displays a message that the registration is accepted. The Network Manager window also shows a similar message.

If the server had trouble connecting to the manager, you need to follow these two additional steps:

1.If automatic detection of the manager fails, the server keeps trying until it times out. If it times out, or if you just get tired of waiting, choose Edit General Settings to open the backburner Server General Properties dialog box, shown in Figure 45-8. In this dialog box, uncheck the Automatic Search box and type in the name or IP address of the computer that is running the network manager. In this case, the server tried but couldn’t quite find the manager, so it had to be told that the manager was running on the computer whose IP address is 150.150.150.150.

2.Click OK to close the backburner Server General Properties dialog box, and then click Close to shut down the server (doing so forces the server to save the changes you’ve made). Restart the server the same way you did before, and now the server and manager are able to find each other.

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Figure 45-8: Manually choosing the manager’s IP address

Note The network manager does not need to have a computer all to itself, so you can also run a network server on the same computer and use it to participate in the rendering.

Tutorial: Completing your first network rendering job

Your rendering farm is up and running and just dying to render something, so let’s put those machines to work.

To start a network rendering job, follow these steps:

1.Start Max, and create a simple animation scene.

This should be as simple as possible because all we’re doing here is verifying that the rendering farm is functional.

2.In Max, choose Rendering Render (F10) to bring up the Render Scene dialog box. In the Time Output section of this dialog box, be sure that Range is selected so that you really do render multiple frames instead of the default single frame.

3.In the Render Output section of the Render Scene dialog box, click Files to open the Render Output File dialog box. In the Save In section, choose the output drive and directory that you created in the “Configuring shared directories” section.

4.In the File name section of the Render Output File dialog box, type in the name of the first frame. Max automatically numbers each frame for you. Choose a bitmap format from the Save as type list (remember, an animation format will not work).

5.Click Save to close the Render Output File dialog box. (Some file formats might ask you for additional information for your files; if so, just click OK to accept the default options.) Back in the Render Scene dialog box, Max displays the full path to the output directory.

6.In the Render Output section of the Render Scene dialog box, check the Net Render box, as shown in Figure 45-9. Change any other settings you want, such as selecting a viewport, and then click Render.

A Network Job Assignment dialog box opens, like the one shown in Figure 45-10.

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Figure 45-9: The Net Render option must be enabled to start a network rendering job.

Figure 45-10: Using the Network Job Assignment dialog box to locate the manager to handle the rendering job

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7.In the Enter Subnet section of the Network Job Assignment dialog box, click Connect if the Automatic Search box is checked. If it isn’t checked, or if your servers had trouble finding the manager in the “Initializing the network rendering system” tutorial earlier in this chapter, type in the IP address of the machine that’s running the manager and then click Connect.

8.Max then searches for any available rendering servers, connects with it, and adds its name to the list of available servers. Click the server name once, and click Submit.

Tip	If you try to submit the same job again (after either a failed or a successful attempt at ren-
	dering), Max complains because that job already exists in the job queue. You can remove the
	job using the Monitor, or you can click the + button on the Network Job Assignment dialog
	box, and Max adds a number to the job name to make it unique.

After you’ve submitted your job, notices appear on the manager and the servers (like the ones shown in Figures 45-11 and 45-12) that the job has been received. Soon Max starts up on each server, and you see a Rendering dialog box showing the progress of the rendering task. As you can see, this displays useful information such as what frame is being rendered and how long the job is taking. When the entire animation has been rendered, you can go to your output directory to get the bitmap files that Max generated. The render servers and the render manager keep running, ready for the next job request to come in.

Figure 45-11: The network manager detects the new job.

Figure 45-12: One of the network servers receives the command to start a new job.

Job assignment options

The Network Job Assignment dialog box, shown previously in Figure 45-10, has an important section that we didn’t use for our first simple render job called Options.