After messing around with backburner for almost a year, here are some tips for anyone who would like to setup a render farm for Maya;
Backburner 2010 has serious issues working on Maya, funny because it is the version which Maya comes with :S
Backburner 2008 should work fine
Backburner 2011 (recent update), we haven’t tested yet.
If you were using MR
You could use distributed buckets
Could you elaborate on buckets?
Im not sure if you’ve noticed, but whenever you render with mental ray, you see little boxes that appear and they move around whenever that box is rendered.
Every one is a bucket.
For every thread on you computer, it can render one bucket
If your computer is an old single core P4- 1 bucket
a semi-old core 2 duo - 2 buckets
core 2 quad - 4 buckets
i7 hexacore (no hyperthreading ( which is prolly unlikely)) - 6 buckets
usually theres hyperthreading, which creates virtual cores
i7 hexacore with 2 threads per core - 12 buckets
and then finally
dual quadcore xeons with 2 threads per core - 16 buckets
get the idea?
What if you could use the CPU’s of other computers?
Take all the power of other computers, network em, then use all that power on one machine.
I have a 2 dual cores and a quad core
I have eight buckets now!
Search “how to do distributed bucket rendering” on google, its simple to set up and effective in most circumstances