Author: Sam Roe

For any questions, please contact the Digital Arts Tech Team at digitalartslcc@arts.ac.uk.

Hopefully at this point you are ready to submit the job and begin rendering. By now you should have:

• Set your render output settings in Maya

• Uploaded your Maya project to the farm’s network through Elements.

• Checked the file to ensure no textures or references are missing.

If everything looks good, we’re ready to render. 

With your Maya scene open, locate the Deadline tab and select the green Submit to Deadline icon. This will open the Deadline submitter plug-in which allows us to submit jobs directly from Maya. 

Fill out the following information highlighted in red:

Job Name – This is just a description used on the farm, so it can be anything that helps you to identify your job.

Pool – A label that describes your status in the university, which helps us to prioritise renders.

Frames List – The range of frames you wish to render. If you have set up your render settings in Maya the Frame List should already be set but confirm it is correct.

Camera – The camera you wish to render.

Project Path – The top level folder of your Maya project, it should contain all of the sub folders created in the project window in Maya, including Scenes, Images, SourceImages, Data, etc. If you have set your project this should automatically appear linked to your Elements folder. 

Output Path – This will default to the Images folder, which is a good location to use. If you have set your project this should automatically appear linked to your Elements folder. 

Submit Job – Finally select this button to submit your job to the render farm.

Once you have submitted your job, launch Deadline Monitor 10 to view the progress of your render job. 

Deadline Monitor 10 offers detailed information and control options for each job and Worker in the render farm. It provides normal users a means of monitoring and controlling their jobs. 

Is your file ready to render?

The single biggest reason for render failures on the render farm is due to improper setup.

This script will help you to check your file for common errors.

Open the script editor.

Open the script file (Link above and here)

Select the script file. Ensure that All Files or Python Files are filtered (not Mel)

Switch to the custom tab. Save the script to the shelf for easy use in the future. Give a name, and click the new icon to run the script.

The script will hopefully provide some insight that will help you to check if your file is ready to submit to the render farm or not.

It’s important to remember that the render farm is not capable of seeing anything on the computers that we are operating, nor your home computer. For this reason, for the render to be possible, we have to make sure everything that is contained in our render exists on the farm’s network, and we do this by saving our work onto Elements.

To begin, launch and log into Elements with your student details. Select on the folder which applies to your course for example; MIDA Production BA Animation, then select Users, the year that you are in and then create a folder for yourself if you have not yet already. This folder should contain all future project files with which you intend to use the render farm for. 

Unlike our other storage drives, when you save your work to Elements you are able to access it from any of our MIDA computers and even from home if you are using remote access with VMWare Horizon Client. 

Now that you have located the correct folder necessary to upload your project, you can drag or copy the entire project directory into this folder. It’s a good idea to open this file from its new home and ensure that nothing is missing. See the link on the main page ‘Is my file ready to render?‘

VMWare Quick Start Guide

In order for our software to know what we want from our render, we will have to provide instructions such as:

• The type of file we want
• How to name the file
• Which camera to use
• The quality settings

This is all specified in the render settings, located near the top of Maya.

Here are some common settings we may use:

Changing the ‘frame/animation ext’ allows us to render an image sequence. The frame padding is the number of digits to use in the file name, which can be important to some software,

Specify the camera or cameras you wish to render from. If you see multiple there and you do not need to render from those cameras, hit the rubbish bin icon beside them to remove.

The image Size presets provide common output settings. HD_1080 is a good compromise of quality and render time.

In the Arnold tab of the Render Settings, you will find the quality controls as well as many other ways to customise your render.

Rendering is a dense subject that won’t be covered deeply here, but the Arnold Documentation is the best place to start.

In short, the Camera (AA) will multiply the number of samples in the entire project, and provide a cleaner render at the cost of render time. I do not recommend taking this above 6-8, or you will get excessively long render times. The numbers underneath provide specific control over particular aspects of the render.

A Render Farm is a cluster of computers that are made and set specifically for rendering. This is typically used for film and TV VFX projects.  

These computers are called render nodes. Each render node has the required 3D software, the renderer and needed plugins installed.  

Large industry Render Farms typically have thousands of render nodes. 

The rendering process 

Even though we are lucky enough to use a render farm and assign our renders across several computers (render nodes), it does not mean that the renders will always be completed speedily. The length of a render is calculated by: 

• The render settings 
• The complexity of the scene
• Available computing power 

Which means that depending on the settings, a render can either take seconds or it can take hours.  

That’s why it’s important to have your settings optimised for a good quality render, but also a render that is not going to take many hours per frame.