Mental Ray Standalone Network Rendering Guide

• 1 Mental Ray Standalone Network Rendering Guide
  • 1.1 Submitting Mental Ray render jobs to Deadline
    • 1.1.1 Step 1: Setup your Mental Ray Scene File(s)
    • 1.1.2 Step 2: Open the Submission Dialog
    • 1.1.3 Step 3: Set Your Submission Options
    • 1.1.4 Step 4: Submit Your Job

Submitting Mental Ray render jobs to Deadline

Mental Ray Standalone jobs can be submitted from the Deadline Monitor.

Step 1: Setup your Mental Ray Scene File(s)

Export your scene into either one .mi file with all your frames in it, or one .mi file per frame.

Step 2: Open the Submission Dialog

In the Deadline Monitor, open the Mental Ray Submission Dialog from the Submit menu.

Step 3: Set Your Submission Options

The general Deadline options are:

• Job Name: The name of your job (if left blank, it will default to "Untitled").
• Comment: A simple description of your job (can be left blank).
• Department: Your department (can be left blank).
• Pool: The pool that your job is submitted to.
• Group: The group that your job is submitted to.
• Task Timeout: The number of minutes a slave has to render a task for this job before it requeues it (specify 0 for no limit).
• Priority: Your job's priority (0 = lowest, 100 = highest).
• Enable Task Timeout: Whether or not to use the timeout given.
• Concurrent Tasks: The number of tasks a slave should dequeue for this job at once.
• Limit Tasks To Slave's Task Limit: Whether or not to limit the number of tasks the slave rendering this job can concurrently do.
• Machine Limit: The maximum number of machines that can render your job at one time (specify 0 for no limit).
• Machine list: A list of slave machines that is either blacklist or a whitelist.
• Machine is a blacklist: Whether or not the machine is a blacklist, if not it is a whitelist.
• Limit Groups: The limit groups that your job requires.
• Job Dependencies: Jobs that your job is dependent on.
• Submit As Suspended: Submit your job in the suspended state.
• On Job Complete: The action to perform on the jobs completion. Options are Nothing, Delete, or Archive.

The Mental Ray specific options are:

• Input Files: The Mental Ray file(s) to be rendered.
  • If you are submitting with one frame per .mi file, select one of the numbered frames in the sequence, and Monitor will automatically detect the frame range. In this case, you should leave the checkbox marked Separate Input MI Files Per Frame checked. The frames you choose to render should correspond to the numbers on the .mi files.
  • If your .mi file contains all the frames you wish to render, you should leave the Separate Input MI Files Per Frame box unchecked. In this case, you must specify the Input MI File Start Frame, which is the first frame in the input MI file being rendered, as it is used to offset the frame range being passed to the mental ray renderer. You may then specify the frame range as normal.
• Output Folder: The location to which your output files will be written.
• Frames: The list of frames to render.
• Separate Input MI Files Per Frame: Should be checked if you are submitting a sequence of MI files that represent a single frame each.
• Chunk Size: The number of frames per task, if the MI file being rendered contains multiple frames.
• Threads: The number of threads to use for rendering.
• Frame Offset: The first frame in the input MI file being rendered, which is used to offset the frame range being passed to the mental ray renderer.
• Additional Command Line Arguments: Specify additional command line arguments you would like to pass to the mental ray renderer.

Step 4: Submit Your Job

Click the Submit button to submit the job to Deadline.