Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
So how do you address the render farm? You need to provide it with a JOB fi le. A JOB fi le is a little text fi le
that contains very basic information about what the farm needs to do. Some of the information in the fi le is
repetitive because it was supposed to be generated by the integrated Python submission tool. However, it is
simple to edit the fi le to meet our needs. An example JOB fi le for shot 01 of
The Beast
follows:
01
shot01.blend
02
350
03
820
04
1
05
12000
06
scenes
07
shot01.blend
08
720
09
480
10
8
11
8
The left hand column simply shows the line numbers of the fi le for your reference and does not actually
appear in the fi le. Lines 1 and 7 contain the name of the BLEND fi le to be rendered. Line 6 is the name of
the directory within the job directory where the BLEND and JOB fi les are located. Lines 2 and 3 are the
range of frames to render. Lines 8 and 9 are the render resolution, and lines 10 and 11 are the “parts” that tell
Blender how many ways to slice up the render as it works.
You create (or copy and modify) the JOB fi le, place it in the directory with the BLEND fi le, then head to the
command line. When there, type your OS's version of:
Farmerjoe.exe --submit scene shot01.job
The fi rst parameter “scenes” refers to the directory where the JOB fi le resides, and the second part of the
command is the name of the job fi le itself: “shot01.job”. Note that this is NOT the name of the BLEND fi le!
Pointing Farmerjoe directly to anything except a JOB fi le during submission will cause it to malfunction.
NOTE
There is one modifi cation you will need to make to your shot fi les for them to work properly
with Farmerjoe. The output path for animation frames that is saved into your BLEND fi les must
end with a directory. Our general instruction in a previous section was to use the name of the
shot both in the directory and as a fi lename prefi x, yielding something like //../frames/shot05/
shot05. However, Farmerjoe has trouble recognizing prefi xes on frame names, so you should
instead use an output path that ends with a forward slash like //../frames/shot05/. This means
that all generated frames will simply be a number followed by .EXR. As long as the frames
always remain within their named directory, this will not cause a problem.
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