User Guide

9
Installing Apple Qmaster, Shake, and Other Applications
Each rendering application has a slightly different installation procedure. See the
Distributed Processing Setup guide for information on installing the Apple Qmaster suite
of applications.
To use Apple Qmaster with Shake, or other frame-based rendering applications, you
must follow these installation and licensing guidelines:
 To submit batches for Shake, a copy of Shake must be installed on every node in the
cluster. For command-line rendering on Mac OS X, a license is not needed.
 To submit batches for Maya, install and license a copy of Maya on every node in
the cluster.
 To submit batches for other frame-based rendering applications, install a copy of the
rendering application on every node in the cluster. For example, you must install a
copy of After Effects 6.5 on every node in the cluster. It’s important that you install
aerender, the command-line renderer for After Effects. After Effects requires a
product key and serial number before installation.
Note: In all three of the above cases, you will need to install any third-party plug-ins,
fonts, and so on, that your projects require on each node in the cluster.
Setting Up Rendering Services and Shared Storage
Here are some additional tips on setting up an Apple Qmaster “render farm”:
Changing the Number of Rendering Service Instances
By default, Apple Qmaster enables one Rendering service per CPU. On a dual-processor
system, you’ll have two rendering services enabled by default. So that means out of the
box, two copies of Shake will be running at the same time on a dual-processor system.
It may be necessary to disable a rendering service. See the Distributed Processing Setup
guide for information on changing the number of rendering services.
Note: If you are using Shake, you can always change the number of CPUs Shake uses at
submission time by using
-cpus x
where
x
is the number of threads to use.