Thanks to Morgan's facebook post and some coaching from Reuben, I was able to set up renders on four computers last night. I put my simplified folder into the Y drive "Render Farm" folder as an experiment. Doing that means I can fix up one folder instead of loading up a new folder on D drive of every computer I use. I started the process of setting up the renders at 9.30 but there were some problems. First problem, every machine needed to be restarted. This turned out to be a smart move because I didn't restart mine and it decided it was going to do it for me at 10.30 whether I liked it or not. I only lost 7 frames but that was over an hour of rendering. I restarted it early and should have started again from frame 8 but decided to render straight from D drive instead. Second problem, any computer NOT attached to a Cintiq wouldn't let me open a scene on Maya. It was slow beyond belief! I will call tech support today and ask them to suss this out. It will make things worse for all of us if only the most popular stations can be used for rendering. I'm glad that I've started now. I remembered this morning that I will be keeping normal working hours during break because the girls don't leave for their holiday until AFTER we come back from ours. So, I can't be here at 9pm to start the rendering process during the week. If I get going sooner, I will be out of people's way when they start rushing in, panicked, at the end of the holiday.
And here's what I harvested this morning!
111 files/frames from rendering S2P7 over two computers and S2P6 on one computer. I will go through now looking for redundancies from false starts. V. Exciting. I don't know what to do with them now that I have them, though. I will copy them off Y drive so they don't get accidentally lost. I got here at 9.45 and nobody was here yet. It's now 10.27 and still, nobody here. I'm going to experiment with rendering in 10 frame or one hour chunks. That way, if somebody comes in, it won't be a massive inconvenience to either of us for me to move to another machine. And the rendering doesn't have to start from the beginning, just from the frame that is partially rendered.
An hour later, I've got four computers working on another 80 frames of S2P1. It's a very complex scene. If the people who use those machines don't come in until 5, ha ha, I may get the whole 80 frames rendered. This will be an exercise in organisation.
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