Hey everybody,

At work I have access to 50+ computer nodes from HP and we would like to setup a render farm. We installed Windows HPC server 2008 R2 on a head node and a HPC pack on all the other nodes and set them up as workstarions. I’m curious to know if I need to install 3ds max and backburner on all the workstation nodes to be able to run jobs on all the machines?

Ideally we would like to run one instance of 3ds Max on the head node and then have the windows HPC server (or any other software that could do such a thing) distribute the rendering job on all the available processors on all the workstations.

Is that even possible with 3ds max?

Thanks,
Klemen

Firstly, duplicate threads are not permitted here, as per the forum rules therefore your duplicate thread in the Max2010 forum has been removed.

Yes it is possible, and yes each render node has to have a full install of Max including Backburner. They should also all have the same service packs, hotfixes and plugins installed.

Help > Additional Help has 2 documents regarding the installation and use of Backburner - these should be your starting point.

Note that Network Rendering and Distributed Bucket Rendering (MR) are very different - DBR does have limits on how many nodes/processors/cores can be used, though this can be increased by purchasing extra licenses from Mental Images. Network rendering has no such limits (9999 machines IIRC). Also note that the licensing for purchased plugins can differ widely - you will have to check each one individually.

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.

Thanks Steve,

I apologize for the duplicate thread.

I’m aware of the backburner and DBR limitations. We currently have a small proof of concept network with max, backburner and all the necesarry plugins intalled and it works great. I just can’t see what’s the upside of having a windows HPC server if it can’t distribute tasks on it’s own. Or is this purely a max limitation?

I don’t think it’s a Max limitation as such. Max, along with a number of other AD products, use Backburner for distributed rendering and HPC appears to be a similar kind of thing but OS based, therefore every AD product which currently uses BB would have to be made “HPC aware” in order to take advantage of it. At least that’s how I see it, but that is pure guesswork based on a quick read of what MS say about it.

This is really a technical question which I, and I suspect most people here, are not qualified to answer - only AD themselves could do so.

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.

Thank you for your time and information Steve.

I sent the same question to Autodesk trough their official web form. I hope they get back to me with some useful information soon. If I find any more news on this topic I will let you know.