Will Townsend

Hey,

Im off due to school holidays for 2 weeks. I have been in maya rendering some pretty heavy stuff, so I needed to use the mental ray satellite upon my network. Basically creating a renderfarm.

I have created a manager for your maya.rayhosts file, I have had a few emails asking if there is any other ways, as my guide did not make it simple enough. While waiting for a render, I decided to create MRN Manager, Mental ray network manager.

So, Without furthur adue! MRN Manager v1.0!

MRN Manager Interface v1.0

So, the guide!

1. We need a copy of MRN Manager, so, download MentalRayNetworkManager (334) or rapidshare mirror!
2. We need to find out the IP Addresses of the slave computers, Have these handy!
3. Run MRN Manager, and click the ‘Browse’ button. Locate your Maya ‘Prefs’ folder.
   See the maya help docs for more info on the maya prefs folder.
4. If there is currently a maya.rayhosts file, there is no need to create one and it should be automatically detected. If there is no current maya.rayhosts file, create one using the create button.
5. Once you have created/located your maya.rayhosts file, Press the button to load it up.
6. Add, delete or edit any IPs or PC Names using the GUI, Simple.
7. The default port for mental ray satellite 2009 is 7109, Please refer to the documentation as to which port you should use if you are on a different version.
8. Now close MRN Manager, and open maya. Make sure the service ‘RaySat2009Server’ is running on any slave pc’s. This may be different for different versions. Also make sure that the process ‘raysat2009server.exe’ is running on any slave pc’s.
9. Cheack that the required ports are open/forwarded on all pc’s.
10. In maya, make sure you are using the mental ray renderer!
11. Select the render options, Render -> Batch Render (Select the option box on the right)
12. Enjoy Much Faster Renders!

If this helped you, Please leave a comment!

Will,