Hi all,
Our network rendering manager is Backburner. I was looking into setting up Mantra rendering, but I can find absolutely nothing about this. Does anyone know if this is possible or if there are any resources out there concerning this?

i don't know if there are resources for backburner and mantra but it should be possible because it's just commands.
when you can make a test setup with hqueue you could analyse the commands so you could make custom backburner render nodes in houdini.
you also can see the commands when you enter in the console: mantra -h

hope it helps.

Anti-Distinctlyminty
Hi all,
Our network rendering manager is Backburner. I was looking into setting up Mantra rendering, but I can find absolutely nothing about this. Does anyone know if this is possible or if there are any resources out there concerning this?

It's definitely possible and not specially difficult, though requires some scripting. Rendering from Houdini is two step process.

1) Generate *.ifd files for mantra with hscript or hython or hrender script provided with Houdini.
2) Spawn mantra renders using previously generated ifd files.

Once you know these two commands you may send it to Backburner via batch command job (cmdjob.exe).
Some readings here [sidefx.com] and here [sidefx.com] and back burner specific here [codecg.com]

I kinda roll a peace of middleware [github.com] which theoretically should work with Houdini and Backburner, but neither Backburner nor Windows support was tested (honesty Windows branch was only touched, and was roughly tested with Nuke).

Thank you peoples, I'll take a look into doing this and let you know how it went

Not OP, but my studio had me look into this to start a little Houdini pipeline where it's primarily Autodesk tools.

Good news: IT DOES WORK!
Bad news: I don't think I can share the implementation

Anyway, symek summarized it pretty well. I had set up a mantra node locally to generate the IFDs onto the server. Then I created an HDA with all the required parameters from “Advanced Operations” in Appendix B here [download.autodesk.com](page 75 in the PDF).

From there, it was just a matter of hooking up the parameters to generate the command string via scripting. Python was awesome for this.

For those who never played with Backburner before:

1. %tn replaces $F
2. Make sure to set -tp_start, otherwise %tn won't do a whole lot
3. DO NOT SET THE PORT IF IT'S SET TO DEFAULT. It won't submit.