Render Me This, Batman PART 2!

F3 Visual Effects at FSU - Week 6

I love my title pun, "Render Me This, Batman," but I quickly became upset that I used it last week because this week the title is SOOO much more fitting.  So, I just decided to use it again and stick a part 2 after it, just like Hollywood nowadays, right?

Last week I spent most of my time lighting and comping for the animated show "Yeti In Paradise, and that inevitably results in rendering.  My renders on that show took a while to complete, but weren't particularly difficult or time consuming to set up, especially considering I was only able to render on two computers.

This week I am working on the animated show "Live Tree Or Die", and our renders are substantially more complicated and taking much longer per frame.  So... I am currently rendering on nine computers.  Nine!

I understand that professionally I will be rendering on render farms that are set up, maintained, and run by a highly specialized and talented IT crew, but for now at FSU we have to manually set up each render - which all things considered really isn't that bad.  The fact we have more than one 32-core machines to render on alone is amazing.  We have a second computer lab at the end of the hall called the DA Suite, and I decided to take it over.  After faculty worked out a spreadsheet for all of the producers to use so that we could allocate computers for each film to render on, this week I was able to come away with nine.  Like I said, each computer's render had to be manually set up as opposed to the more standard system of shipping the scene off to a farm, and to set up the same render on nine machines meant piping the scene through the server and then copying the whole project file to nine separate machines.  Then I had to manually test the the file paths and set up frame ranges on each computer.  All together it took me about two hours running hectically back and forth between two labs to set this up.  What I ended up with was something that would make Lucious Fox proud:

A sea of computers all quietly chugging away in the DA Suite, each using 31 of the 32 available cores to process :,)

Tears of joy.

Now let's hope we didn't miss something in our test renders.....