Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
You might be wondering at this point if all of this is worth it. In fact, it is. I spent about a half a day setting up
and confi guring Farmerjoe, and that was without the help of this fi ne topic! After a few times, the process of
creating a shot directory and loading both the per-shot BLEND fi le and a master JOB fi le became little more
than repetitive simplicity. I just grabbed the JOB fi le from the previous shot and changed the fi lenames and
frame ranges.
Running Farmerjoe Remotely
One of the reasons that the command line is emphasized so heavily here is the ease with which it can be used
for remote operations. Rendering for The Beast was generously donated by Reed & Witting Company, a high
end commercial printer located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania ( http://www.reed-witting.com ). The
resources I was able to use totaled four render cores on Linux machines, four on OS X machines, and eight
on Windows boxes. This gave the farm 16 processor cores to work with. Not the mind-boggling strength
that Pixar or the big boys use, but it was enough for me.
To operate the farm remotely, an SSH tunnel was created through the fi rewall, reaching a VNC server that
resided on the master machine: an OS X computer. This is probably a bit of advanced networking stuff for
the artiste, and you're really not expected to be able to do this yourself. However, any good IT person should
be able to set this up for you. VNC is a remote desktop program that allowed me to control the OS X master
remotely, as though I were sitting right in front of it. From there, I ran several terminal programs on the OS
X computer, starting the master, web application, and a slave. Using both Telnet and SSH, I obtained termi-
nals on all of the slaves that were attached to the same local network as the master and ran their respective
slave commands. Of course, if you're getting some-
one to set up a scheme like this for you, see if you
can get the person to script the startup of the dif-
ferent nodes and processes so that you don't have to
do any of it by hand.
Render
Slave
Render
Slave
Render
Slave
Render
Slave
Farmerjoe Master
Master
Process
Shots and
Assets
Rendered
Frames
A second hole was put in the fi rewall to allow
external access to the Farmerjoe web application.
FTP access was granted to the farmerjoe directory
on the master computer.
Firewall/SSH
In this way, I could FTP my shot and JOB fi les into
place in the master directory from off site, use SSH
to access the OS X master to “--submit” jobs, then
monitor their progress through the web interface.
A couple of fi nal frames were sampled via FTP to
make sure that things were rendering correctly, but
the full collection of all rendered frames was done on
DVD due to the large size and number of the fi les.
The diagram in Figure 15.71 shows the structure.
VNC
(Remote
desktop)
FTP
Access
Home
Workstation
Figure 15.71
A render farm setup with remote access
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