Maya Render Farm
 

'lo all!

I'm not much into digital art, so you may have to bear with me.

My recent roomate is into this stuff with a passion, and has a copy of Maya Unlimited. He's not much on the technical side of computing, which is where I spend the most of my time. Anyway, I have several high-powered servers in my garage that I do various things on, and recently had the idea that it might be possible to set up a small render-farm so that he could do his stuff more quickly.

The limited research I've done has come up with apps called backburner, renderman, and netrender; but making sense of all these is tricky for me, so I though you guys might be able to help.

Here's the setup:
His machine: Windows XP running Maya Unlimited
3 Servers in the garage, all running gentoo linux.
1 decently-fast workstation in the living room, running windows xp.

Is there any peice of software I can run on the other computers that would allow his computer to use their processing power?

Thanks for the help, and the patience...

hey fury, the stuff you mentioned above are all seperated rendering apps. Not to sure what backburner does, Renderman is another 3D renderer and I think net renderer is a distributor for renderers.
Anyways, if he is using maya than he will have the ability to setup a renderfarm with the Maya Software renderer at no extra cost. You need to install Maya on everymachine to do this and than set up licenses to read on the network or something. If he wishes to use Mental ray for Maya for rendering than basically you will have to call the wondeful people at Alias and they can help purchase a license per processor.
Maya does not come with a GUI to control the rendering which means you will nedd to go out and purchase one or there are a few free ones floating around the net. This will allow him to control what machine this will go to what frames blahh, blahh, blahh.

I hope this info helps you out.

Since he has the windows version, do we also need to get a linux version for the linux servers? Or can I just download the maya software renderer and install it on those servers?

same OS only for the Maya Software renderer version unless he purchased a floating license, than the floating license will allow to render on different OS.