V-Ray with Backburner

[dbhinnant]

Hello all,

We have a 30+ computer render farm.  Most of our jobs consist of 3000+ frame outdoor daytime animations.  We render with Mental Ray and submit the jobs via Backburner.  Since we are now forced to pay for this functionality with Mental Ray it looks like a good time to make the switch to V-Ray.  Can anyone comment on what kind of snags we may run into?  With Backburner being so buggy anyway, I'm concerned with how V-Ray will work vs. Mental Ray when submitting network jobs.  Any shared experience would be greatly appreciated.

[jon.bell]

Hi,

You shouldn't have any specific issues sending VRay rendering jobs to your network via Backburner, although you may be interested in investigating more modern network rendering software, such as below:

ButterflyNetRender -- Liquid Dream Apps
Deadline – Thinkbox Software
Muster – Virtual Vertex
Qube! – PipelineFX
Render Pal – Render Pal
Royal Render – Royal Render
Rush – Seriss (Maya only)
Smedge -- Uberware
SquidNet – Squidnet Software

Backburner is admittedly old, legacy code, and we've seen quite a few issues with it and Windows 10, so investigating your other network render manager options might be helpful. In addition, you'll need to purchase render node licenses for VRay from the Chaos Group.

Please let us know if this helps!

Best regards,

[dbhinnant]

Doesn't say much about Autodesk's commitment to overhauling Backburner when they recommend buying something else.

[rmarkowitz]

Hi - out of curiosity, do you have a recommendation for a local renderfarm service like backburner for v-ray and 3ds max? Cloud render services are not a good option for us.

Thanks

[dbhinnant]

I don't have a recommendation other than to say Deadline seems to be the one most talked about.  We ended up purchasing V-Ray and are still using Backburner.  Since migrating to Windows 10 we were able to take Backburner off of a server and move the entire farm to local workstations.  Since doing this, it has run with minimal issues.  This leads me to believe our constant issues in the past were firewall related.

[kintaro_takanori]

"..old code and weve seen problems with it"

any plans to make a new version? it feels like everything is left for dead. maya not getting much needed upgrades and backburner being from like windows XP times. every small studio or freelancer would love to have such a tool.

i tried deadline and its a pain in the ass to set it up and i wasnt able because i got stuck at one point. i used official documentation. if i have to invest multiple hours, not to mention the research before it, thats never a good thing. a rendermanager should have 1 job. take scenes and submit it to a thing that renders this thing. this doesnt require 50 people to code. give us a simple tool, integrated into maya that does this simple task.

sincerely every paying autodesk customer