| After Effects render farms don't seem to be that common, but a few commercial products have been mentioned on this list before. Perhaps try searching for 'render farm'. The only one I've used is Deadline, which also works with 3dsmax, Maya, and other programs. Check out the website for all of the details of how it works, it's great. Once you adjust your workflow to use image sequences, it becomes second nature to send stuff off to the farm to render.
Other people here have mentioned alternative commercial solutions that also work very well.
-Chris
On 03/10/2012, at 5:31 AM, Elliot Steele wrote:
Network rendering
Evening (or morning for some I guess!) chaps & chapesses,
I’ve got a small render farm which I have been using for 3dsmax (using the standard Backburner) & would like to use the farm to render some quite long renders (10k frames, taking 24hrs on a 12-Core Mac Pro).
The way my 3dsmax renders work is that I set up the render in max, submit the job to Backburner & that’s it. The process takes as long as it takes to save the file & to send it off (not long!).
The individual render nodes open the submitted file & pull any referenced externally referenced scenes (xrefs) or maps from their original locations.
The way I understand the AE way of network rendering is that I must first collect the project & all source files into the “watch” folder & then the render nodes will do their stuff.
If this is correct, why must all the source files be “collected”? Are the render nodes unable for some reason to read them from their original locations?
The problem I have is that for a particular project the source files are in the 10s of GB & copying them every time I want to submit a network job is madness.
Do I understand the process correctly? Is there a way of submitting jobs without collecting all the source files?
Does anyone use an alternative method (maybe using a commercial solution?) to network render in AE?
Many thanks for any thoughts!
Elliot Steele
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
digitalMEDIA Technik GmbH
Am Berg 20
91809 Wellheim
tel.: 08427 985011
fax: 08427 985012
handy: 0172 8410163
E-Mail: elliot.steele@digitalmediatechnik.de
HRB 5012, Amtsgericht Ingolstadt
Geschäftsführer Elliot Steele
USt-Nr: 124/124/40585
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
