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126 Chapter 17: Rendering
local system, w ith buckets “arriv ing” in an
indeterminate order.
Ex ample: To use menta l r ay di stri buted buck et
rendering with B ack burner:
This procedure demonstrates how to multiply
the number of CPUs use d for rendering without
hav i ng to purchase mental ray standalone licenses,
using the 3ds Max satellite technology.
If you have a few machines with 3ds Max licensed,
and m any machines without, you can use
both the distr ibuted rendering technology and
Backburner so a rendering job would use 10 CPUs
per Backburner server, thereby increasing the
rendering speed.
For the purpose of this procedure, we ’re using a
render farm comprising three machines named A,
B, and C, each running a licensed copy of 3ds Max.
Note: The number of machines you c an use
depends on the number of machines running
licensed copies of 3ds Max. You are able to use
only eight external (or satellite) CPUs per licensed
copy of 3ds Max: four dual-processor machines or
eight sing le-processor machines (or equivalent).
1. Choose which machines (other than machines
A, B, and C ) will serve as satellites, install
3ds Max on each, and write down each
machine’s IP address.
2. Use the Windows Notepad program or a text
editor to open the max.rayhosts file on machine
A, located in mentalray subdirector y within the
program folder .
3. In the max.rayhosts file, under the “localhost”
entry enter the IP address of each satellite CPU
to be used; up to eight in all (see Figure 1).
Figure 1 - Example of a rayhost file
4. RepeattheprevioussteponmachinesBandC
w ith the remaining IP addresses.
5. Launch Backburner Manager on the machine
submitting the job or any other machine.
Launch the Backburner Server on machines A,
B, and C.
Wa rn in g : It is necessary for t he machine running
theBackburnerServertohave3dsMaxlicensed.A
mental ray standalone license will not enable you to
use the distributed bucket rendering feature, and
Backburner will prompt you with a license error.
6.
On the machine submitting the job choose
mental ray as the renderer, and then turn on
Use Placeholder Objects, Use mental r ay Map
Manager (see Figure 2), and the Distributed
Render (see Figure 3).
Figure 2 – Translator Options