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Backburner is ancient. Every time you change something, it's a huge pain to try to get working; it's had it's day, and a few more days it never should have had. I don't necessarily want something as advanced as Deadline, but something that works when you install it, gives useful information about renders and errors, and is somewhat streamlined and modern.
But really, I just want it to work without effort.
id love to hear how many people use BackBurner and in what type of environment. Whats the size of your farm and what renderer do you use. better understanding of what you need will be a great help.
I use backburner to manage two machines, or to manage the full farm of 30 machines. I use scanline, vRay, and finalRender, depending on the nature of the thing being rendered.
Most of my problems with BB end up relating to;
-error descriptors that are meaningless (in other words, hard to fix if you have no idea what is causing it!)
-IPV6, and other network routing/connection issues
-server names
-timeouts
-inability to ignore missing plugins, maps
I would like to see a bit more skill on the software's part to parse out frames. My farm has machines that range from bleeding edge to bled to death. To that end, it would be great if BB would learn how fast a computer is (especially in a given scene), and it would pull off ancient servers from high load jobs, and put them to low load jobs. (Even if I have to tell BB which is which.)
I would also like to be able to put two jobs at a higher priority level (other than critical) and tell it not to interrupt jobs in progress.
We stopped using BB a while back due to it's inflexibility and have instead moved over to Deadline. Plus, Deadline (and many of the other render management systems) work well with third party tools such as Nuke, After Effects, V-Ray standalone (DBR), Unreal and other "rendering" applications.
If BB could add an API for extensibility and fix many of the issues listed above, it would be useful. Don't get me wrong. It is a good tool for small shops needing a free option for controlling a small farm, but it is too basic beyond a certain point.
Perhaps, and this is just a suggestion, Autodesk should consider licensing Deadline and including a "lite" version with all of the M&E and some AEC products. This version would support 5 to 10 machines as opposed to the current 2 for free. Or better yet, buy Deadline (or Thinkbox for that matter).
This may sound crazy but this would really, really help a lot of people if community could fix things in backburner.
From some point of view BB seems old or ancient, but it does its job and it's simple and functional. The only downside is that it has some bugs that are not get fixed. I believe some of the bugs could be fixed by the community.
I'm using BB for only one machine when I need to render few jobs overnight. But with Art Render I rarely achieve succesful completion of jobs... rather errors and trying to render over ond over again...
Ignoring missing plugins and maps would be great as well as error description.
We use backburner for a render farm of about 10 machines rendering with mental ray, on stills it is mostly ok, but when rendering animations it errors and stops working when moving from one job to another - great when you leave it over a weekend and come back to find none of your renders going!
Would be great if an overhaul of Backburner could be done. It seems that this useful software hasn't been updated for a while. Maybe introduce a web based version to keep an eye on the renders from a mobile device etc.
I can definitely get behind this, especially if the opportunity is taken to do a "deep dive" to remove legacy code, streamline existing code, and make it easier to update in the future. With such an update there would likely be a rebranding to go along with it (should keep marketing happy ).
For a web-based version, how about something on the already-existing A360 service? Such as a control panel which receives status updates and the like? It's already well established so there isn't the need to re-invent the wheel.
Any kind of major update would likely involve dumping support for older OS versions, so it's likely users would be forced to do some major updates on both operating systems and 3DSMAX versions. I can see some not being happy about that.
I've been using Backburner for 15-ish years and it's pretty much the same as when I first used it. Definitely needs a full overhaul as its sorely lacking in many useful features that we see in programs like Deadline. Ie. having a 'wake on lan' function would be great to use on our render farm as we're forced to leave it on 24/7 to pick up new jobs. So many things need to be overhauled!
Backburner has a web monitor but it's sub-par and I've never seen anyone use it because of this. I've opted to just remote into the manager server directly, which isn't ideal.
Replacing backburner, or at least overhauling it, would be a very smart move on Autodesk's part.
I've only been an Autodesk customer for 7 years, but it seems, according to people who have been Autodesk consumers for more than 7 years, that Backburner has been like this for more than just 7 years, rather probably a couple decades.
Here's a good question, the person who made/designed backburner, is he still at Autodesk? If so, then that'd be great, 'cause it should be easy for him to modify his project. If not, well, I'm not too surprised, and it makes it more imperative that Autodesk doesn't let backburner wither and die off.
Please Autodesk, backburner is nice, but it's so old. A newer render-management software would be nice, or at least a major overhaul to the existing backburner that we have right now.
We currently have a 36 node render farm. The farm is made up of our 5 current workstations along with retired workstations and CADD machines. A typical render job for us is a 4000 frame highway animation with a very large poly count.
I have much the same concerns/suggestions as Kris above. Worthless error messages being the biggest issue.
We are on a large secure network administered by others. It was very difficult to setup with our network security team due to lack of detailed information on how the manager communicated with the nodes. Communication was taking place on many more ports than in the documentation. Autodesk support could not give us any help. We finally had to open a large range of ports to get it working.
It would be nice to have remote access to error logs and the ability to stop/start/restart the service.
I have pretty much the same farm setup and types of renders as dbhinnant. One problem I deal with regularly is that servers lose connection to the manager. Restarting the service solves the problem. It would be nice to be able to do that from the monitor application. I'm currently rendering with Mental Ray.
We have a 25 node (dual-Xeon) farm using Corona Renderer. We'll send through 15,000 frame jobs pretty frequently. Some observations:
- editing anything about an active job result in all nodes dropping the current frame and going idle for a few seconds and start again
- resetting tasks on a stuck node do not work, you have to suspend the entire job and restart rather than BB re-assigning the task
- nodes sometimes randomly drop connection
Suggestions:
- Would be great if render engines could interact with BB. Ie. allow Corona, Vray etc to pass additional scene parameters and render settings to BB rather than just frame timing, size etc. Some sort of open API would be needed here
We have about 40 nodes on the network plus an additional 10 workstations which is running backburner between work.
We are 100% reliant on backburner working. And it is only working barely. It is a constant struggle to keep 40 machines connected. some fall out all the time with manager blabbering about it cannot handle registering them.
One machine will sometimes render wrong. And the feature to reset tasks doesn't work, and more often than not, when sorting frames by computer monitor will just crash.
There are tons of cryptic error messages with ID numbers that has no explanation or documentation behind them. In 90% of cases where problems occur with a machine, a complete reinstall of windows on the rendernode is required. Because of something, somewhere. A clean installed windows 10 machine can suddenly run into problems after running a windows update. Trying desperately to turn all windows updates off, windows 10 forces them on us like a quiet assassin, ruining rendernode after rendernode, slowly but steadily. Not all luckily. Just some gets screwed up. My point is that the backburner system is really fragile.
Sometimes backburner will tell you something is wrong, i'm missing a map, or a node has the wrong max service pack. But still let it render wrong.
As a professional, I can say that this software desperately needs a complete overhaul using modern algorithms and net-code. Autodesk cut out windows XP from running 3D studio MAX. While backburner still is compatible with windows 95 probably.
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