So I’ve setup backburner to optimally use our 6 workstations to use overnight because most of them don’t do anything during the night! Now that I have these heavy underwater scenes with fog, water and lots of reflections and refractions going on the render times are going up. So why not use available equipment?!

Believe me it took me a lot of hours setting this up. Finding the right solution for every problem that the backburner log gave has been hell. Setting the right share folders, firewall rules, path translations, vray command, task timeouts all gave me problems… But now it works! Here’s a quick overview on what to do. This goes for Maya and V-Ray.

• Setup one workstation as manager. (Can be slave too but not recommended by the manual).
• Setup the rest as slave. Make them point towards the manager within the application.
• Make sure all resources (assets, HDRI’s, textures etc.) are on the local drives of each slave. Also make sure that they have the same paths!! (I.e. D:Mayaresourceimagesdirt.tga)
• Scene has to be in a shared folder, reachable by all slaves.
• Create backburner job
• Set task size to 1 (each task will contain only 1 frame, otherwise one computer will i.e. render 10 frames and move on to the next task).
• Point to the appropriate manager (name or IP address is sufficient)
• If you want to create render logs per task you can do so here. Point them to an existing folder! (You might also be able to write to a shared folder. Just change it in the custom command! Set it up like this: “//COMPUTER_NAME/Share/backburner logs”. however I have not tested this yet!)
• The scene should be in a shared folder! In the custom command make sure to add the correct slashes: “COMPUTER-NAMEMayascenesScene_name.mb””)
• In the command replace file with vray and add a timeout (in minutes!): -timeout 1440 (for 24 hour timeout)
• Check Use Custom Command and click Populate Command.

Make sure to edit the command as fore mentioned. The command in the end should look something like this:

system ("""C:/Program Files (x86)/Autodesk/Backburner/cmdjob.exe" -jobName "Job_name" -description "Discription Here" -manager MANAGER-COMPUTERNAME -timeout 1440 -suspended -logPath "C:/backburner logs" -priority 50 -taskList "C:/Users/user/AppData/Local/Temp/Job_name.txt" -taskName 1 "C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2015/bin/Render" -r vray -s %tp2 -e %tp3 -proj "//COMPUTER-NAME/Maya" -rd "//COMPUTER-NAME/Maya/images"  "COMPUTER-NAMEMayascenesScene_name.mb"")