Hello,

Our team is rendering an intense sim. The whole sim must be done in frame order & on one machine.

The artistic members want a farm based machine to do the sim and as each frame of sim is done, a mantra render is started on another computer.

We have a renderfarm and 30 licenses of hbatch & we render in Mantra.
We have 4 licenses of Houdini FX.

I use Rush as the renderfarm controller but I can switch to anything if it makes life easier.


I was thinking I could solve this problem in Rush by making three jobs for the render submission. First job sims and exports IFD files using one computer. Second job periodically monitors the rush log of the first job because Rush updates in near real time. If the second job notices a new IFD frame is done, the second job unpauses the corresponding frame in the third job. The third job is comprised of the per frame mantra tasks.

I'd love to hear how other people handle this situation. Currently we wait for all IFD files to be generated and then all the mantra tasks start but artists want rendered feedback sooner than later.

I would consider using the post-frame script on the ifd-gen job to submit the resulting ifd file to mantra for rendering.

G