2008

off-line for some reason, the Manager reclaims the Server's current frame and
reassigns the frame to the next available rendering Server.
The Basic Process
Following is a step-by-step description of the sequence of events when you
use network rendering:
1 The user submits a job to the network Manager.
2 On the submitting machine, the MAX file gets zipped up. If the user
turned on Include Maps, all maps and XRefs are also zipped up.
3 Once the file is zipped up, the ZIP file is copied to the Manager machine's
Backburner\Network\Jobs\<jobname> folder. In the folder is an XML file
describing the job itself, specifying frame size, output filename, frame
range, render settings, etc.
4 Once the Manager receives the ZIP and XML files, it looks to see which
servers are sitting idle and can render jobs. It assigns the job to four servers
at a time. (This is the Max Concurrent Assignments setting on the
Manager General Properties dialog. See
Starting Network Rendering on
page 6248 ).
5 Each Server machine receives the ZIP and XML files into the
Backburner\Network\jobtemp folder.
6 The MAX file gets unzipped, along with the maps and XRefs if they were
included.
7 3ds Max is launched and loads the MAX file. If the maps and XRefs were
not included, the software searches for them as they are defined in the
MAX file. For instance, if an XRef is in d:\foo\xref.max, the Server will look
for xref.max in d:\foo\ on the local machine. If there are additional map
paths set in the 3dsmax.ini on page 51 file on the rendering server, it
will search in those paths as well. If it does not find the maps and XRefs,
the server fails for that particular job.
This is why it is important to use UNC paths for all maps and XRefs in
your scene file, so that all render servers can find them. However, if the
maps and XRefs were included, then 3ds Max will get the ones that were
unzipped into the \jobtemp folder.
8 When a frame is finished rendering, 3ds Max on the Server saves the
frame to the location specified via the Render Scene dialog before you
submitted it.
How Network Rendering Works | 6247