DIY Remote Renderfarm using Dropbox and Backburner? Help Wanted Please

[Anonymous]

Hi

I have a reasonable backburner render farm at my office and sometimes I get remote freelancers to help me out rendering images. They currently use Rebusfarm because it's alway last minute and we have no room for mistakes.

However, it seems like I could save some money by getting things sorted before the next big deadline. I am wondering what's the simplest way of doing this?

Things I am also interested in:

1) Could a dropbox shared folder be used as a backburner watch folder?

2) Will the backburner watch folder accept archived zipped files and what scripts will help the freelancers submits error free files to the farm?

3) Anyway, thy could use say TeamViewer to monitor the progress of the images?

OK a lot of ifs and maybes here, has anyone done this before with a foolproof workflow?

Regards Rueben

[jon.bell · Accepted solution]

Hi Rueben,

Thanks for your questions. If you have remote artists who'd like to use your render farm to do shots, I'd suggest the following:

1.) Have a shared drive/folder on your network that they could access and upload files to (both Max scenes and bitmaps.) If they were able to log into this machine via VPN/Team Viewer, they could unzip everything to that drive's folder. They could then load their scenes on that machine's copy of Max and submit them to the render nodes. (I don't know of specific scripts that would help them submit scene files; if you want a more robust network rendering solution than Backburner, I would suggest 3rd-party rendering tools like RenderPal, Qube or Deadline.)

2.) Make sure that they repath every texture bitmap and other scene asset in their Max files (using the Asset Tracker) to use UNC paths to that folder -- NOT to a shared/mapped network drive (like "Z:\PROJECTs.") The path name for both scene assets and for rendered output should be \\Machine_Share_Name\Shared_Folder.

3.) I do not recommend using Dropbox for shared assets or renders unless you're setting UNC paths to that Dropbox location (which is typically going to be located in C:\Users\username\Dropbox.) Even if you share that Dropbox folder, it shouldn't be a mapped drive letter -- all machines on the network need to access it via a UNC path.

4.) If you grant Team Viewer or Windows Remote Desktop access to your Manager machine and are running the Backburner Queue Monitor, there's no reason why your artists couldn't log in and check the status of their renders.

Please let me know if this helps!

Best regards,

Jon A. Bell

Autodesk Technical Support

[Anonymous]

thank you, some good ideas 🙂