From Backburner Blues to Render Farm Relief
After using Dynamite VSP for a number of years, I decided to start using a render farm to create my animations. After reading the Autodesk documentation and comments on the DVSP forums, it sounded like a simple process to set up. A very good article written by Gary Davis “Down on the Farm” gave me the final inspiration to set the process in motion.
Up until this point I had been using my own “home made” render farm, where I would manually farm out portions of an animation to various computers or “slaves”. Each slave would render a series of frames directly to AVI format, and then I would compile all AVIs into a final animation. I found a way to do this all off one VIZ license and while this process does work, there are many limitations with it.
Anyway, once I started to set up the render farm I encountered a few problems, and I couldn’t find any documentation or information to help. I have since fixed the errors and I thought I would include them here, so if any one else has similar problems it might be of some help.
Initial Problems
I have always installed Backburner at the same time as VIZ, and so I felt assumed that the software would work without too many headaches. Our computers are all networked and communicating between computers has never been a problem. I used an old laptop as the backburner Manager, and launched the Server application on the slaves that would form my render farm. The Manager accepted all the slaves, and I was ready to start my first net render.
I submitted the net render job from my VIZ computer, which the Manager accepted into the queue. But the render job would not start or “activate” and all slaves would sit idle.
Error logs in the backburner directory indicated that some kind of blocking going on: “A blocking operation was interrupted by a call to WSACancelBlockingCall. (0x2714)”. My immediate thoughts were that company firewall settings had stopping the job from rendering. Turning off the firewall and group policy settings had no effect and the slaves would still sit idle after sending the net render job.
After re-reading the Autodesk documentation and searching the internet for these backburner errors, I was almost ready to throw the towel in and give up. Maybe this is too hard to setup after all, was my main thought.
However, after a few days with the problems put firmly on the “backburner”, sense prevailed and I decided to check what actual versions of backburner I had installed, and if in fact it was the correct install. My setup was VIZ 2008 and the latest backburner version 3.02, along with a VIZ2007 which I had never un-installed. I discovered that VIZ2008 actually should install backburner version 2007.0.2.224. Ah so that’s my problem then! A quick un-install and re-install of backburner should fix the problem.
Making Progress
So, that’s what I did, followed by sending another net render job to the queue, only to find a new error: “No plugin available to handle job” At least I was having some progress now!!
A closer inspection of my VIZ and Backburner installations showed that the new version of backburner was still pointing to the VIZ 2007 directories for some reason. A quick un-install of VIZ2007 had no effect on backburner, and the “No plugin” error still remained.
Now my course of action was clear. Un-install *all* VIZ products, Backburner and DVSP along with the deletion of any keys in registry referring to VIZ and Discreet products. I then did a re-install of VIZ 2008 and backburner version 2007.0.2.224 and all of a sudden the net render to backburner was working !!! Hooray - success at last!!
Because I had never previously used Backburner, I was wasn’t sure of what to look for in the net rendering dialog boxes. This would have shown me some vital signs that all was not well with my render farm setup. When you use the net render option in VIZ / MAX, the Network Job Assignment dialog is opened. The first step is then to connect to the Manager PC. Once connected, the servers or slaves should all be shown in the top right hand corner. See the difference in screen shots. The first shows that I have connection to the Manager, but no slaves are listed. The second shows a correct connection to the Manager and all slaves are listed.
Once connected properly, the render jobs can be submitted and the render farm activates and starts farming out frames to the slaves.
Anyway, I’m off to get my monies worth out of VIZ now and to catch up on lost rendering time.
Happy rendering !!
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