Using The Renderfarm

During this project I don't plan to use the Renderfarm how ever last year I rendered out one of  my turntables (see image below). The reason I don't plan to use the render farm at Ravensbourne is that I'm lucky enough to have access to Framestores render farm (unable to show images of their Renderfarm sever). I plan to use this instead as I have used it many times when working in the film department and its very easy and user friendly to set up when it comes to render layers and render passes in EXR format, I have tried to do this at ravensbourne and it was unable to render them out correctly or the render would fail.

Here are some of the notes found about the renderfarm:


- All project and texture files, reference files and of course scene files relating to your project should be in a single folder or sub folders thereof. This folder must be copied in its entirety to the \\vanguard\repository share.

All texture locations in your project must reference your project folder. So you must change all of these appropriately when you copy it to the \\vanguard\repository share.
Use Render Layers. By using Render Layers you can avoid making any individual frame too complex. This will minimise the potential impact of issues to a single layer as you are not putting all your eggs in one basket. And renders will be much quicker overall. 

Texture tips: 

Size. All texture sizes should be a power of two in each dimension e.g 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096 etc. 

Purpose. If you work for a special effects house huge textures 16384x16384 may be appropriate. However, textures of 512x512 or less are sufficient for most of the projects you are working on. 
Square textures. Usually, it is best to use textures that are square because Maya can use these more efficiently. However, it may be appropriate to use a non square texture if it suits the object being textured.

File Format. The tiff format is recommended because it is more detailed and is uncompressed, so suited towards processor intensive applications such as rendering. Avoid large jpeg’s altogether.

Optimise your Maya scene. This process will optimise the scene of all unassigned shader nodes. This is found on Maya’s menu under File>Optimise Scene Size.

Perform a render diagnostic to identify any problems that there may be with your scene. This can be started from the Render View window by selecting File>Render Diagnostics from the menu. Once this has completed the results will be displayed in the Maya Script Editor. Using this information you can fix problems that may prevent your scene from rendering or at least from doing so inefficiently.