Our students do not have very complex rendering requirements, so we have very rarely had rendering issues that were not a direct result of User error. I was originally thinking of creating a simple gui just as Matt suggested as we do have enough standalone licences for our small farm.
I think I am going to go the route of just using the batch render and script that. I think its something the students would be able to use. I have used Muster and liked it but their EDU prices are out of our price range ;( Will need to check to see what the current prices are for Royal Render. I have had a look at the Whats New in Softimage 2015 that Chris posted again and while progressive rendering is in there doesn't seem to be any mention of being able to use the GPU for final renders so CPU farm still seems to be our way forward currently. Thanks all the input. ________________________________ From: Sven Constable [sixsi_l...@imagefront.de] Sent: 14 April 2014 11:36 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: RE: Mental Ray Standalone You're right, but I think these advantages of using standalone-MR are very low or not existent in a educational environment. I wouldn't expect student to change MI2 files to get access to MR features that are not exposed in the GUI of their 3D-application. And that applies to Softimage as well as maya or 3dsmax. I was not talking about rendering from the GUI versus standalone but rendering xsi-scenes via batch with royalrender (or any other manager) instead of rendering pure MI2 files. sven From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Matt Lind Sent: Monday, April 14, 2014 11:06 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: RE: Mental Ray Standalone 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> [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Sven Constable Sent: Monday, April 14, 2014 1:15 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto: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 This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. 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