Render Farms and Windows Upgrades

Over the last few months we’ve had issues here at work with our technology in the 3D Department. With little experience running and or troubleshooting a render farm before Windows Vista I had to essentially teach myself. The scouring of the web offered little assistance in this effort as for one most of our render nodes are running Vista and one now runs 7. This seemed to be problematic on its own, but then toss in the fact that it is 64 bit and all hell breaks loose. Even the stark contrasts between Vista and 7 are a little ridiculous.

As luck would have it, I found a few gems via Google searches which help not only to solve problems but to avoid them from the start. Most of this information was relevant to the software: backburner. Good, because 3DS Max in its newer incarnations has native problems with it – why the hell would Autodesk release software which it breaks with certain new features in a co-Dependant program is beyond me – and as such these were the first “severe” problems. Our first bit of success was due in large part to babying the whole process. Every machine had to be logged into a user account with permissions and access to backburner, Max and vRay, all of the server drives and left completely alone. Doing anything on these machines would slow – either your attempt at progress or the renders attempt at – progress to a crawl. The upside for render farm newbies is that you can physically view progress on a shot as well as get on screen information about any and all errors. This is all fine and dandy, but it is not so efficient. And as of a few minutes ago, thanks to one last bit of googling and a fortunate error on the software side I have – I believe – solved our render farms puzzle.

How? For those who are tech inclined, continue reading. Treat Vista and 7 like they are one stupid stupid child. Microsoft treats the average user like a stupid child and as such we need to undo this. Firstly: find your backburner folder, open up the security properties for it and add your administrator account to have full access to the files and folders inside. Note that this should also be done for any files or folder you will be loading from, saving to or xref-ing.Second: Open up an elevated command prompt (for the less tech inclined, right click on the shortcut and click “run as administrator”), locate your backburner folder and type “serversvc -i” on all render nodes. On the render manager also type “managersvc -i”.

This installs all your services for backburner. Awesome, I know.In my first attempts I had assumed that simply doing this and starting said services would work. Wrong!To make this all work open up your windows firewall, or other if you have some and add software exceptions for serversvc.exe and manager.svc.

Lastly: open up computer management and navigate to your services. On your render manager select the backburner manager service, open its properties and add your administrative account information in the log on tab. When done it should prompt you that you have given the service and user log on abilities.Do this as well for all of the backburner server services and fire all the services up.Open up your Monitor and send a project.If you’ve had success like me then you can log off all of your render nodes and leave them at the logon screen and watch the progress from Monitor. Voila! Our Renderfarm is finally working.

If anyone else needs some other assistance the last link that got me through the end of it is http://area.autodesk.com/forum/autodesk-3ds-max/autodesk-3ds-max–3ds-max-design-2010/backburner-and-vista-problems/