My setup:

- 1 Houdini FX workstation license (with 5 Karma tokens)
- 2 PCs: one used as my main workstation, and the other intended for rendering

My situation:
I’m not a technical artist, and I’m the only Houdini user in my company. So I’m trying to figure out how to use my second PC for rendering while continuing to work on my main machine with little to no knowledge.

I’ve found very little documentation that I can either find or understand on how to set this up. Topics like HQueue or Husk feel completely alien to me, and I haven’t been able to find any step-by-step guides that explain the process in a beginner-friendly way.
On top of that, my company has multiple layers of firewall restrictions and internal procedures for installing software, setting up servers, or even opening a terminal (for example, sending an IP address from my main PC to the second PC).

My question:
Given these constraints, does anyone have advice on the simplest or most practical way to use my extra PC for rendering?

Thank you!

One pretty easy solution is Deadline. (https://docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/products/deadline/10.4/1_User%20Manual/manual/index-introduction-to-deadline.html) It is free nowadays for less the x computers and it is not too complicated to setup and has a good feature-set imho.

If you get it working, please make a tutorial!

w_maro
If you get it working, please make a tutorial!

Seriously? Maybe on a mixed farm with different kinds of OS, but i've had nothing but walks in the park when installing this. Granted, i've been using it for well over 15 years now, from when it was still thinkbox software, so maybe I've grown accustomed to it, but iirc it is as simple as installing executables on windows where the whole process of making a mongo db is done step by step and explained well in the documentation.
What part are you struggling with?

Nah, Deadline definitely has pitfalls for new users. Some off the top of my head:
- you need to know the basics of sharing folders over a network
- you need to know that during the installation you can skip security certificates if you want to, or alternatively know how to then authenticate using them
- you need to know how to connect to the repository (direct connection vs RCS, the latter requiring an extra install if i recall)
And that's just the start
- then you need to know how to install Houdini submitters from the repo
- how to manually add newer Houdini versions that aren't supported
- finally, bonus chaos points if you haven't ever actually used Deadline before and don't know how it's supposed to work
And then there's the whole topic of licenses when rendering with Houdini.exe or Husk.exe, where Deadline does not ship with a custom Husk plugin/submitter.

If you know the answers, it's pretty trivial, but if you don't it's definitely paralyzing. I'm a Deadline fan, but I wonder if Hqueue wouldn't maybe be a little simpler here. I've never used it though.