backburner Workflow

Network rendering systems are often referred to as render farms—one workstation is set up as the manager, which "farms out" or distributes the work to the render workstations.

With backburner, you submit a job to the backburner Manager application from combustion or the stand-alone Render Queue application.

The Manager application assigns different tasks for the job to each render server. A server can receive one or more tasks from the manager, and a task can be one or more frames.

Note: In this chapter, the manager is the workstation running the backburner Manager application, and a server is a workstation running the backburner Server application.

Once a server renders a frame of an assigned task, the frame is sent to an output folder. The server then renders the next frame in the task (if the task includes more than one frame). When the server completes the assigned task, the manager assigns another task to the server, and so on.

Note: The manager workstation can also work as a render server.

Once the network render starts, you can use the backburner Monitor application to directly monitor and control the network rendering workload. Use this application to edit job settings as well as to activate, deactivate, and reorder both submitted jobs and servers involved in the network render.

The completed output of all the servers accumulates in a common, shared folder. The rendered frames are numbered sequentially.

Servers with no tasks are automatically detected by the manager and assigned a new task. If a server goes offline for any reason, the manager reclaims the server's current task and reassigns the task to the next available server.