Comment Depends on your workstations (Score 5, Informative) 253
Hey
I've set up and administrated a number of farms over the years (doing it as I type. its.. what I do). One thing you really want to do, certainly with Maya's renderer, is to try to use the same OS and platform on your farm as you use on your user workstations. There can be subtle or even obvious differences in the render output between OS's, and since you'll have enough issues to deal with you'll want to keep cross-platform incompatabilities out of the mix. Please, trust me on this. Had to deal with Maya Irix/Win2k/Linux differences in the past.
As for queueing software, give Condor a look-see. Free and functional. I reverse-engineered a Perl version of it before they made their source available, and my version has been run quite successfully at several animation studios and an effects house over the years. It's a well architected system for distributed computing.
Feel free to contact me if you've got any other render system or management questions. I'm always interested in seeing how other studios approach the challenge.
I've set up and administrated a number of farms over the years (doing it as I type. its.. what I do). One thing you really want to do, certainly with Maya's renderer, is to try to use the same OS and platform on your farm as you use on your user workstations. There can be subtle or even obvious differences in the render output between OS's, and since you'll have enough issues to deal with you'll want to keep cross-platform incompatabilities out of the mix. Please, trust me on this. Had to deal with Maya Irix/Win2k/Linux differences in the past.
As for queueing software, give Condor a look-see. Free and functional. I reverse-engineered a Perl version of it before they made their source available, and my version has been run quite successfully at several animation studios and an effects house over the years. It's a well architected system for distributed computing.
Feel free to contact me if you've got any other render system or management questions. I'm always interested in seeing how other studios approach the challenge.
