Setup Maya Batch Render on the Render Farm: UVa School of Architecture

Autodesk Maya has a number of options for rendering full animation jobs. This is a full offline render queue, sending the

job across the network to render on the farm, and freeing the local computer to continue working or log off.

Please note that this method of rendering is best suited to large animation sequences rather than single images like V-

Ray. Batch rendering through Backburner will split up your animation job into groups of frames, where each node of the

Farm will render a different section of frames rather than different parts of the same image.

For example, a 100 frame animation, for instance, might put frames 1-20 on one node, 21-40 on another node, 41-60 on

a third node, and so forth. All will be rendering simultaneously.

School workstations already have all necessary software installed. For your own computer, you would need to have a

few things installed and working:

1. Autodesk Maya 2017

2. Backburner 2018

3. V-Ray for Maya – Only needed for using V-Ray as your rendering engine. If you plan on using Maya Software as

your renderer, then you do not need this installed.

Whether you are connecting from your own computer or a school workstation, you need to do a few things to setup

your file:

1. Set your Maya Project – particularly the

location where images will be saved to

when rendered – to a folder on

ScanTemp. Click File > Project Window

to set this location.

Note: You must use the network for

network rendering. The farm cannot see

your laptop, nor can it see the

workstation you are sitting at. Use ScanTemp.

2. You may need to change Maya’s mode to Rendering by clicking on the drop-down menu in the upper-left corner

and clicking on Rendering. Next, send a BackBurner job from Maya by clicking on Render > Create Backburner

Job.

Setup Maya Batch Render on the Render Farm: UVa School of Architecture

3. Please refer to the following settings:

Job Name: Create a Job Name or use the

default. The job name must be unique.

You cannot re-use the same job name.

Job names also cannot contain spaces, so

be sure to use underscores as needed.

Manager Name:

renderfarm01.arch.virginia.edu

Port: 7347

On a Mac:

You can run Maya and Backburner on a

Mac and send to the render farm just the

same as Windows. You only need to

change two path settings.

Set the Renderer Path in the dialog to:

C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2017/bin/Render.exe

Set the Backburner Path in the dialog to:

/opt/Autodesk/backburner/cmdjob

(If you’re using a different year version of

Maya, set the year appropriately)

When finished with the settings, click

Submit Job.

4. After a couple of minutes, check the

Images folder in your Maya project

folder on ScanTemp for the rendered

images. Or, to view progress of your

job, refer to the next page for

instructions on using the monitor tool.

Setup Maya Batch Render on the Render Farm: UVa School of Architecture

Viewing Progress (From Windows Only)

To view Progress of your render job, or see the queue, use the

BackBurner monitor tool. On school workstations, you will find this

located in the Start Menu > Autodesk Backburner 2018.0 folder >

Monitor.

You will need to connect to the management server to see the

queue. This is the same as above: renderfarm01.arch.virginia.edu