Maya Hardware Render - Display Access?

[lineplot]

Greetings,

I'm interested in running hardware renders (for fast previews) on our Red Hat linux-based qube 5.2 farm.  The problem is that maya hardware renders require the a hardware graphics buffer, that is, the use of a screen.  The daemons don't have a screen.   

One approach is this - if qubeproxy is also logged into the GUI console, then a qubeproxy shell job can export DISPLAY=:0 and then run graphics applications on the console screen.  This works with xclock anyway.  But if there is no console login, it is blocked. 

If I login to the GUI console as qubeproxy, and run a job with -renderer hw, the job errors out with this stderr - any thoughts on how to get it to work?

...
INFO: rendering camera [mainCameraShape2]
setAttr mainCameraShape2.renderable 1
setAttr defaultRenderLayer.renderable 1
editRenderLayerGlobals -crl defaultRenderLayer
currentRenderer()
Result: hw

INFO: rendering layer [defaultRenderLayer] using renderer [hw]
mayaBatchRenderProcedure(0, "", "defaultRenderLayer", "hw", ""); system ("/usr/bin/perl -e \"sleep 1\"");
Error: The renderer hw is not registered yet.
ERROR: mel command [mayaBatchRenderProcedure(0, "", "defaultRenderLayer", "hw", ""); system ("/usr/bin/perl -e \"sleep 1\"");] failed
The renderer hw is not registered yet.

[shinya]

Hi-

How are you exactly submitting the job?

Try the render name "mayaHardware" instead of "hw", or save the
renderer choice into the scenefile (i.e., open the scene, "render settings",
change the renderer to hardware, and save the scene).

If you get errors like:
----
X Error of failed request:  GLXBadContext
  Major opcode of failed request:  144 (GLX)
  Minor opcode of failed request:  5 (X_GLXMakeCurrent)
  Serial number of failed request:  272
  Current serial number in output stream:  272
ERROR: Exception caught!-- ERROR: lost pipe to maya-- has it crashed? at /usr/local/pfx/jobtypes/maya/MelProcessor.pm line 586.
----

You may also need to graphically log into the worker that's running the job, and
run "xhost +" or similar to give your job access to the X server.

[lineplot]

Shinya,

Thanks - I'm finally getting back to this.  I found a recent post here at:
    http://support.pipelinefx.com/smf/index.php?topic=619.0

Which suggests using virtual framebuffers.  I'll try that, or since we do have a graphics chip on these machine, I'll try a direct fb access too.   And I'll follow up on that other thread since it's more recent.

Thanks again.

[michael.graf]

this may apply to your situation
VirtualGL project
http://www.virtualgl.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualGL

[shinya]

Hey guys,

Thanks Michael, for posting the link to virtualGL.  Haven't checked it
out yet, but sounds interesting.

lineplot, let us know how things go with your situation.

I'd like to find some time and do some experiments with a similar
situation, and hopefully generalize it enough and put it up on our
KB or something... eventually. 

Aloha.