Managing Maya network rendering

You can manage Maya network rendering in two ways:

• Manually. See Network render with the render command line utility.
• Automated, provided by Backburner or another third-party solution. See Network rendering with Backburner for more information.

Computer preparation

Maya network rendering requires a network of properly configured computers.

Tip: Maya network rendering may read and write numerous files over the network simultaneously. Make sure your network bandwidth can handle the traffic. Consider rendering files locally on each render node, then transferring them to the final destination.

File Access

All files, scenes, and textures you use must be stored in locations accessible to each render workstation. This can be achieved by doing either of the following:

• Providing the files to all the render workstations from a central file server. File permissions must be adjusted for your environment.
• Transferring the files to each render workstation’s local storage.

Plug-ins

Make sure all render workstations used to render a scene containing plug-ins have those plug-ins installed, and that each render workstation has a valid license for those plug-ins. If a render workstation does not have a license for a plug-in being used, you may find that every frame it processes fails.

Tip: Cache data in the scene to prevent unwanted differences between frames, computers, effects, and so on.

Note: There are numerous third-party solutions that provide solutions for network rendering. Please check our Conductor Partners for available solutions.

Attention: Mixing Standalone or Satellite rendering with mental ray for Maya batch network rendering is not supported. Be aware of the contents of your maya.rayhosts file.