hey all

I'm interested in knowing what other people/studio's do when network rendering?

If its needed to have 10-20 render workstations.

what is the recommended sollution for rendering software ?

renderman?
mantra? - can one just buy mantra?
some prman compliant renderer (AIR)?

thanks all in advance for any comments

aracid

Well if you are using Houdini you get 5 render licenses for free with each license. That may have changed, but if it has I'm sure it's more.
We use mantra and generate ifds onto a central server then just have a small python script that runs everywhere picking up the ifds and rendering them. Cheap and effective.
You can definetely buy more mantra render licenses too if you need them.

Bit of a loaded question when asking the “what's the best rendering solution”. Renderman is certainly very nice, I'm less impressed with the raytracing end of it since they introduced it, but it's still a very nice renderer - it was what we started with here. However, over the last couple of years we weaned ourselves off it and are mostly a mantra shop now. I will caveat that with the fact that we have a fairly technical guy working here who has been doing some great code porting for it, but then if you're going to use renderman you *have* to have someone like that anyway if you want to have anything beyond the obvious looks.

Mantra is cheaper, if you're already buying into Houdini, and while the renderman integration in Houdini is second to none, with mantra you get that much more integration and all the kewl VEX stuff.

We also use the free Sun Grid Engine [gridengine.sunsource.net] as a renderfarm solution - it scales very well, extremely reliable, and I've uploaded a sample python submission script for Houdini + SGE on the Digital Assets site.

Cheers,

J.C.

hey hey

Thanks you guys

yeah it is a tall order, but that's cool news.

we looking at renderman as a solution, because most of the artists here are maya based, but have a big interest in houdini as an additional tool.

thanks once again :-)

all the best
aracid