A few of you have noticed that we have included three versions of Backburner with 3ds Max 2011 & 3ds Max Design 2011.

• Autodesk® Backburner™ 2008.1.1, installed by default in the installer
• Autodesk® Backburner™ 2008.2.1, IPV6 version of the above
• Autodesk® Backburner™ 2011.0.0, new plugin API and consistent with other M&E 2011 released products (ie Maya 2011)

This certainly can be confusing as to which is the right version you should be using, so I’ve gathered some notes from our developers and outlined a few things that you should be aware of when making this decision.

First to locate the two extra versions of Backburner 2008.2 and Backburner 2011 you need to browse to the .\support\backburner\ folder of the installation image. These versions were not included in the main installer since there are important factors you need to consider before installing one of these and as many of you know updating several machines on a render farm can not only be tedious but also problematic if everything is not setup consistently with the workstations submitting the render jobs.

Backburner 2008.1

This is the same version of Backburner that shipped with the English version of 3ds Max 2010 & 3ds Max Design 2010. if you already have the 3ds Max 2010 release installed then the 3d Max 2011 installer will recognize that Backburner 2008.1 is already installed and will not update it.

Backburner 2008.2

3ds Max 2010, 3ds Max 2011, 3ds Max Design 2010, and 3ds Max Design 2011 all can submit jobs to an IPv6 only Backburner network. You will need Backburner 2008.2 for this to be possible. Again this is for an IPv6 only network if you are on a IPv4 network then you should use the default Backburner 2008.1 or Backburner 2011.

WARNING: If you are not working on an IPv6 only network and you install Backburner 2008.2, the network rendering in 3ds Max/3ds Max Design and in Backburner will be unusable. If you are working on an IPv6 only network, you need to confirm that all of the conditions on the checklist in below are met before installing Backburner 2008.2. Please note that Backburner 2008.2 has no other updates, features, or bug fixes in addition to Backburner 2008.1. Only install the Backburner 2008.2 update if you are running an IPv6 only network.

This specific maintenance update version of Backburner is only supported in an IPv6 only network; all machines must only have IPv6 installed and not IPv4.

Before Installing Autodesk Backburner 2008.2

Confirm all of the following before attempting to install Backburner 2008.2:

• Your network is an IPv6 only network.
• You have already installed Autodesk 3ds Max/3ds Max Design 2010 or 2011.
• You have uninstalled previous versions of Backburner.
• You have cleaned your Backburner registry.

For additional details please see the "Backburner_2008 2_(IPv6Only)_Readme.pdf" included in the installation folder.

Backburner 2011

Backburner 2011 is the same version of Backburner that is also now shipping with Maya 2011 and other M&E products. Aligning 3ds Max to this release of Backburner required pretty significant changes to the 3ds Max Backburner plugin with in the app. These changes are completely transparent to you as a user, however there are restrictions you need to be aware of before using this new version of Backburner.

Limitations

• Backburner plugins for 3ds Max 2010, 3ds Max Design 2010 and older releases will NOT be picked up by Backburner 2011. This is a big change from the way it used to work and we understand this to be a major limitation to using Backburner 2011, thus why Backburner 2008.1 is the default install.
• Backburner 2011 & Backburner 2008.1 server.exe can NOT run on the same machine, you will get problems doing so.
• Backburner 2011 & Backburner 2008.1 manager.exe can NOT run on the same machine.
• Backburner 2008.1 will work with 3ds Max/Design 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, ect…

Why choose Backburner 2011?

Honestly, most will probably find no change from Backburner 2008.1 and should stay with Backburner 2008.1 for the time being.

• If all users and workstations that are submitting render jobs to Backburner are only using 3ds Max 2011 or 3ds Max Design 2011 then you will be able to use Backburner 2011.
• If you require submitting render job from previous releases of 3ds Max or 3ds Max Design then you most likely will not be able to use Backburner 2011 and should stay with the Backburner 2008.1 release.
• If you have a mixed render farm with 3ds Max/Design 2011 & Maya 2011 then you should upgrade to Backburner 2011.

The changes between Backburner 2008.1 and Backburner 2011 are minor, but now that the 3ds Max 2011 plugin is in sync with the newer internal API we are able to maintain and improve Backburner across the product line more efficiently. In the past the 3ds Max plugin was on a completely different API then the other products so it was very difficult for us to take improvements added by the Backburner team. The goal for this release was to simply invest in syncing our builds to the newer API and server technology at hopefully zero feature loss to you, however this investment equates to little added value for the current release.

What's New in Backburner 2011?

If you do choose to upgrade to Backburner 2011 please investigate using the new Flash based web monitor. A concentration of our efforts since the 2008.1 release have been focused at improving this feature set. Also, there have been improvements to network error messages and fixing a few general networking issues.

Please see the Backburner 2011 Documentation for additional details on these new features or changes in Backburner 2011

• Improved Documentation
• Backburner on Mac OS X (not supported for 3ds Max 2011 exe)
• New Backburner Web Monitor
• Support for Smoke 2010 for Mac OS X
• Support for Maya 2010 on Mac OS X
• Support for 3ds Max 2011
• New Command-Job Adapter
• Combustion Compatibility Break

Contacting Customer Support

It is not recommended to post support related question to this blog. I will do my best to answer questions about known limitations or features, but most of this information is also included in the documentation that is referenced in this posting. For support related concerns please contact Autodesk Customer Support directly, http://www.autodesk.com/support, many network configurations and variables make troubleshooting for Backburner extremely difficult to do on forums such as this. You should also review the new Backburner 2011 troubleshooting section of the documentation for further suggestions. Customer support is also available through your Autodesk reseller, you can locate the reseller look-up database at http://www.autodesk.com/resellers.

Shane Griffith
Product Manager - 3ds Max & 3ds Max Design
Media and Entertainment Division
Autodesk, Inc

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