Single-Frame Distributed Rendering with Maya 2008?

[gsnyder]

Hi PFX,

Is it currently possible to distribute a single-frame render across multiple workers using Qube?  We're using Maya 2008 with Qube 5.2.

Thanks!
Gary Snyder
Technical Art Director
Propaganda Games

[shinya]

Hi Gary,

Thanks for your post, and sorry for not being able to answer this one sooner.

We do support mental ray satellite renders with Qube and the maya jobtype.  All limitations of the mental ray satellite renderer do apply, but you can have up to 8 nodes working on a single image.

For other renderers, it's entirely possible to implement similar distributed rendering given Qube's flexible open APIs, but we don't have them "out of the box".

We do offer custom development solutions, so if you're interested, please contact our sales reps and/or your Qube reseller for more info.

Thanks!

[gsnyder]

Thanks for the response, and Happy New Year!

So let's say I have a cluster of 4 quad-core machines, each running Maya Complete.  Each machine would then have 2 MR Satellite Nodes available, meaning every machine could contribute 2 CPUs, each using a MR Satellite Node, to a single render?

Cheers,
Gary

[gsnyder]

A quick follow-up for Shinya:

I managed to get this going by setting the mental ray Satellite appropriately in the Maya Qube Submission dialog.  Somehow I had overlooked that on my first go at it.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
-Gary

[shinya]

Hi Gary,

Thanks for your follow up report-- glad to hear that you've got mray satellite working now. 

The feature is rather new, so I suspect that there's lots of room for improvement-- please post your suggestions here, or email us!

Thanks again.

[gsnyder]

You got it.  I have been running different permutations of mray satellite jobs, and have been noticing something 'interesting'.

My test job using a single CPU (using m-ray Satellite - Complete) are rendering just as quickly as an mray satellite job with 8 allocated CPUs.  The image is 1000x1547, and my output times hover at approx. 4.5 minutes.  This leads me to believe that all the subjobs are just rendering the full image.

Can you think of something I'm not doing properly?

Thanks!
-Gary

[shinya]

Hi Gary,

Thanks for the feedback!

Are you specifying, in the "Qube Options" tab, the number of CPUs
(which actually specify the number of "subjobs" or instances of the app),
to, say, 8, when you submit the satellite job?  You need to specify that
in addition to specifying "unlimited (8CPUs)" in the Render Settings Override
tab.

It sounds like you are, but I'm double-checking just in case.

For further troubleshooting, I'll need to take a look at one of your
satellite jobs' logs.  Could you follow the instructions below, and
send it to support@pipelinefx.com?  Thanks!

----
In order to address your problem more completely, please send us the job log directory for the job in question.

You can locate the directory by logging into your Supervisor, and looking for the job log folder in the following location (depending upon your Supervisor platform):

Windows
\Program Files\pfx\qube\logs\job

Linux, OS X
/var/spool/qube/job

In that folder, you will find a numbered directory that corresponds to the number of thousands in the job ID. (ID < 1000 = 0) Search in one of these folders for the one that corresponds to the correct job ID.

Zip up the entire job ID folder and reply to this email message with the zipped file.

If the zipped job ID folder turns out to be larger than 2MB, don't send it, but let us know and we will help you address the problem in an alternative fashion.

[gsnyder]

Those are the exact settings I've tried, yeah.  I'll zip up the logs and email them to you right away!

Thanks,
-Gary

[shinya]

Hi Gary,

I guess Eric's taken over the tech-support case, and have given you
a few suggestions.  Please give them a try, and let us know how things go.

Thanks!