Distributed Rendering with Mantra on Windows

[stevegh]

Hey all,

Just wanted to share this information in case someone else ran into the same issue I had. My goal was to be able to network render buckets (distributed single frame rendering) without actually installing Houdini on each farm node. To do this, I just setup a .bat file similar to one that was posted for mass changing of the license server with changes to the registry for the installation location of Houdini. Setting the PATH environment variable let me render on each machine individually, but hserver looks to the registry entry when calling mantra. Also, I had to modify the hserver.ini:

# readIPMask +.+.+.*
# writeIPMask +.+.+.*
# becomes:
readIPMask *.*.*.*
writeIPMask *.*.*.*
[/CODE]

to avoid getting write errors. I'll attach the .bat file for anyone who wants it. All you need to do is go to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Side Effects Software] in regedit on a machine that has Houdini installed, export the entire folder to a .reg file, and modify the .bat file to include that file (it is called `houdini-test.reg` in the attached file). Also copy hserver.exe and the modified hserver.ini from Windows\System32 to the same folder as the .bat and run it on all the nodes! Then simply go to your Mantra ROP, and enter:

[CODE]
mantra -H node1,node2,node3...
[/CODE]

and watch the buckets fly woo!

houdiniClientInstall.zip

[anim]

I believe there is some info on that here as well

http://odforce.net/w...remoterendering

so you may want to add your info there as well to make it easier to find in the future

Edited May 30, 2013 by anim

[stevegh]

Yes that page helped a lot but a couple small details were left for me to figure out (good few hours spent chasing errors). So if it helps anyone, great. If not, oh well!