RenderPal

RenderPal is a useful, reliable and professional render management system for a high number of renderers and compositing tools, including Maya, Mental Ray, Softimage XSI, 3d Studio Max, Lightwave, Apple Shake, Adobe After Effects, Realflow and many more.

RenderPal V2 incorporates numerous new features and improvements, which were mainly based on comments and suggestions from our users. With large, high-end render farms in mind, we rewrote many parts of RenderPal to guarantee a stable workflow at all times.

Beside the improved reliability, managing and maintaining large render farms with ease is a key requirement of any solid Render Management System.

New features like the automatic update deployment, the Remote Controller (which supersedes the Job Submitter), and the ability to remotely configure clients make RenderPal V2 more comfortable than ever.

Another important aspect of RenderPal V2 are its flexibility and extensibility. Net job events allow you to execute programs, system commands or even Python scripts on various events that occur during the lifetime of a net job.

Custom renderers are easier to create now, and together with our Python support, it is even possible to create script based custom renderers.

The monitoring capabilities of RenderPal V2 have also been greatly improved. More information is visible to the end user, and the new net job chunk list allows for a detailed overview and control of a net job and its various parts. As often requested by our users, it is now also possible to remotely view events and output from any client.

To cope with the large amount of pools, clients and net jobs found in a render farm, we integrated view filters into RenderPal V2, which allow for showing only items that match certain user-defined criteria.

A render set is the base of any net job; it consists of one or more scene files to be rendered, as well as various render settings that can be set on the fly. These act as overrides to the original settings made in the scene, so you can render your files with different scenes without touching or altering them.

Frame splitting is the key to render animations across a network. RenderPal V2 lets you divide an animation into smaller chunks which will then be rendered by the various clients.

Rendering large images (4096x4096 or even larger) can be troublesome, so RenderPal V2 allows you to slice down such images into smaller pieces, which will then be rendered by individual clients.

Unfortunately, images do not always get rendered properly. To counter this problem, RenderPal V2 offers the ability to automatically check for missing frames, so that they can be automatically resubmitted.

Net jobs offer numerous options that let you define how a job should be dispatched. This includes the selection of specific pools and clients which should work on the job, a priority system, automatic chunk resubmission if rendering times are too high or too low and more.

One of the most powerful features of RenderPal V2 are its net job events, which allow you to execute a program, a system command or even a Python script on certain net job events (like when a chunk has been rendered and so on).

Clients & Client Pools

All render clients are organized into various, user-defined pools (groups of clients). These pools are not just organization units, but also offer numerous features on its own, like scheduling, automatic shutdown of idle clients and different dispatch modes, which determine how the chunks of their assigned net jobs should be divided among the clients.

In a render farm consisting of 250 or more clients, nobody wants to manually configure each and every client. Due to this, RenderPal V2 offers easy remote configuration of clients, which allows you to easily configure all your clients from a single workstation.

Clients can send so-called heartbeats to the server (or a broadcast address), so that the RenderPal V2 Server will automatically know about their existence. Clients found in this way can then be automatically assigned to a client pool and will thus be immediately ready for rendering without any user interaction.

Users can control and monitor clients in many ways from their remote workstations. This includes on the fly configuration, retrieval of event and output logs or job control.

Controlling & Monitoring

The RenderPal V2 Remote Controller is used to monitor and control your render farm from any workstation, even over the internet. Users can log into the Server and manage the render farm in any way. From submitting new net jobs to modifying the client pools, it can all be done remotely. The user management allows you to create user accounts which will be used to log into the server. Each account can have its own permissions and pool access, allowing for a very precise user control.

The main view of RenderPal V2, the server tab, offers a detailed overview of your entire farm, including all clients, net jobs and their associated chunks.

Having all pools, clients and net jobs visible at a time can often be hindering, so RenderPal V2 offers view filters to restrict the amount of shown items to only those that match certain user-defined criteria.

Users can control and monitor clients in many ways from their remote workstations. This includes on the fly configuration, retrieval of event and output logs or job control.

Automatic Updates

In RenderPal V2, it is no longer necessary to update any component manually. Instead, all you have to do is to add a new update in the update management and RenderPal V2 will do the rest. All clients and remote controllers will be automatically updated.

While most updates will come directly from us, it is also possible to create your own updates, which can, for example, be used to deploy new custom renderers or some Python scripts. Since the updater itself utilizes Python, you can do much more with it than just deploying new files.

Miscellaneous

One of the biggest burden when working with mixed platforms are their different paths. All systems have their own path conventions, and using UNC is not always the best choice. This is why RenderPal V2 offers so-called path maps, which allow you to map an incoming path to something else. They can be defined globally, per pool or per client and drastically ease working with multiple operating systems.

Both the RenderPal V2 Server and Client can be configured to be automatically started on system startup (even without the need of a user to log in). Under Windows, it is also possible to let RenderPal V2 recreate your network mappings.

RenderPal V2 can automatically send emails about various events, like finished or erroneous net jobs. It is even possible to periodically send status reports.