Render Farm Build 39

DISCLAIMER: This is a continuing series detailing the painful story of a DIY render farm build.  It is terribly technics and
somewhat frustrating.  Those who are unprepared for such “entertainment” are advised to ignore these posts.

Having repaired the link between Master and Slave, the Farm was working quite well.  Of course I had to pick at it, though – couldn’t leave well enough alone.  This matter of the crappy C4D submission script was still getting to me.  But at this point I figured it would be best to image the first worker and replicate it – because from this point on it was only going to matter how the scripts are written, not whether or not the workers have the right stuff installed.  So all that work can happen on the PDC.

I have Luxrender and After Effects working, and that’s the bulk of the work I do. I love the idea of Cinema 4D working, but with Cinema 4D I would be more likely to ship the rendering off to Maxwell, Thea, or Indigo, all of which are installed on the worker anyway. It’s only a matter of getting a Dr. Queue script that submits successfully to the command line interface on each of those renderers.

The fact that I now understand what to do with job submission and script generators is actually quite remarkable.  I’m still going to screw it up trying to do any of that, but at least I know where I’m going.

The Cinema 4D script included with Dr. Queue seems to be riddled with issues. Most of them being that key terms, noticeably, “SCENE” and perhaps “RENDERDIR” are not well defined for Mac OS and scripts generated crap out looking for those variables. No wonder this script is not included in drqman. I will go online to try to find another.

Not only that – I have realized now that drqman would have to be recompiled to get new job scripts into it. That’s not a bad plan, but it’s a little advanced for me right now…

So, I started imaging the clones.

Doing Magog first.  I needed to dupe drives, get IPs set manually, and work out the power issues in the room.

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