Hi,
is it possible to install Mantra as a standalone package?

We have a hand full of educational licences for Houdini. But along with the full educational licenses, we also were given a good deal more rendering tokens.

I'd really like to try using these rendering tokens in one of our larger computing labs. However I can't make a case to IT for installing the full package, without also having a full license for every machine. But I can make a case for installing only Mantra as I do have rendering licences for every machine.

Is this doable?

-Sim

The standard way to install Houdini for your render farm is to have it installed on a shared network drive from which each client will then run it. Thus, you do not install Houdini on the clients at all (but you do have to install the HQueue clients, though those do not require a licence, so you should be fine with your network dept).

Alternatively you could argue that you IT dept that in fact you do have licences, just not for GUI operation.

Hey thanks a lot for that response.
That definitely sounds doable. I'm going off to do some testing.

Sim.

Hi,
I'm hoping people can give me there advice on how they make IFD farm rendering part of their workflow.

Over the last month we've been working with IT to try out installing Mantra on a shared network drive. And we're having limited success.

We're using Deadline to do the rendering jobs. We'll submit a Houdini job, but override the output to be IFD's. Then have Deadline also submit a dependent Mantra job.

A computer with a full installation has no problems rendering the IFD files. But the lab computer using the shared install fails when it tries to compile any shaders that come inside the IFD. It can't find any of the header (.h) files.

Currently what's installed on the shared drive is the contents of the bin folder.

So how do other people deal with this?

I am definitely out of my depth here. There's two main avenues I've been thinking of going down:
-Work out how to set up dependencies (environment variables?) better in the IFD files. Also setting up more of Houdini on the shared drive. Though I'm not sure exactly which files. (for example there's 2 voplib.h files and they're different!) Or where to locate them in relation to the binaries?

-The other thing I'm thinking is to have everything compiled before it gets into the IFD. I haven't compiled anything before in Houdini. I tried it out, doesn't seem to hard. But unless I'm missing a great big ‘pre-compile everything before render IFD’ checkbox - it seems like I would be forever having to update all my object and light shaders every time I go to render?

Any suggestions?

Sim.