User Guide

18
Mental Ray for Maya Submissions and Other Options:
To use Mental Ray for Maya renderer, add -r mr to the options field. You must have a
licensed copy of Maya on each node in the cluster to use the Mental Ray renderer.
Apple Qmaster does not use Maya Satellite, so in this regard, there is no difference in
Maya Complete vs. Maya Unlimited, except for the plug-ins that ship with Unlimited. If
the node in question has only one CPU, the number of satellite CPUs does not apply to
Apple Qmaster.
Another option is -rt. This specifies the number of rendering threads. By default, the
number of rendering threads is 2. You might want to change this value depending on
the type of computers in your cluster. In a homogeneous cluster environment, say of
Mac Pro or PowerMac Quad systems, you would change this value to 4, as there are
four CPUs per node, and some Maya operations might be faster with more threads. This
option is passed to all the nodes in the cluster. So, if you have nodes that vary in the
number of CPUs, you will have to be careful with the number of threads you use. Too
many threads can result in lower performance for those nodes.
If you want to selectively enable the number of threads a node uses, you must
use a wrapper.
To force Apple Qmaster to heed Maya plug-in warnings, remove or rename the
following file:
/Library/Application\ Support/Apple\ Qmaster/
MayaCommandPlugin.commandPlugin/Contents/Resources/mayascript.
Submitting Batches with the Generic Render Command
You can use the Generic Render command in Apple Qmaster for the distributed
processing of projects from other frame-based rendering applications (such as After
Effects and LightWave). The plug-in dialog allows you to adjust parameters, and to add
more command-line options to each job.