Issues rendering with MentalRay Satellite, NLM, and Pipeline, Help!

[Anonymous]

I have setup 12 clients and a server via Pipeline to render our Maya renders. We have 3 Network Licenses which are controlled by a NLM Server allowing 5 clients per license to render via MentalRay. Pipeline renders all the clients perfectly fine using software and hardware render, but with MentalRay, it starts and all looks good, but no progression is made. MentalRay satellite has been installed on all clients and the "initialization" has been done, but I am still not having any success. Has anyone else had any of these issues? Does anyone know what steps possibly need to be taken? Be gentle, I am learning all of this as I go so I may have missed steps etc.

[3dMastermind]

Hi, I personally don't find 'Satellite rendering' a good option any more.

Satellite: tiles from the same frame are rendered on slaves.

This option is highly dependent on network and is not such a good option now that we have powerful machines with

multiple processors/cores.

Since you have network licenses, you need to use the Batch licenses:

look here:

http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Maya-Rende...

Then look into "command line" rendering by running the same command on all the machines involved.

http://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2015/ENU/?guid=Vari_Command_line_rendering

example:

render -r mr -s 1 -e 12 -b 2 -skipExistingFrames on sceneName.mb

the

"-skipExistingFrames on"

is a popular option so that all the machines render the next available frame.

This way, each machine renders a "fame" and looks for the next available frame to render.