Rendering on the network

You will generally need to generate the intermediate scene description file required by your renderer, since the renderers themselves don’t know about .hip files. For mantra this is an IFD file, for RenderMan and other RIB renderers it’s a RIB file. See how to generate an IFD file for more information.

You can start a remote render on any host computer on the network that has the hserver license administration server installed. The hserver program is installed alongside Houdini, or it can be installed separately using the Houdini installer to create a render node.

To start a render on one or more remote hosts, use the -H option to mantra, followed by a comma-separated list of host names.

mantra -H host1,host2,... scene.ifd

If texture maps are on network drives, the hserver service must be set up to run as a user with sufficient permissions to access the network, and paths for texture maps should be specified as UNC paths.

The Alfred render output node takes another render node and bundles it and its render dependencies as an Alfred job.

You can add Alfred-specific properties to other renderers in the dependency tree to customize the arguments used to Alfred for that part of the job. For example, you might want different memory usage arguments for the main render and the shadow pass.

Other network render managers will usually come with their own support for Houdini/mantra. Check your software’s documentation.

• In general, you should set your job up so that all paths are relative to the $HIP directory. A good setup is to have all of your .bgeo files in a geo subdirectory and set your render nodes to write into a pic subdirectory.

• Double check where your image output is going. You don’t want to send a job out to the render farm with the output picture set to ip (interactive display in MPlay).

• On Windows, you should specify resources on the network (such as shared texture maps) using UNC paths.