Previous tip newly posted on May 10, 2013 by Bill McKown, Synergis Solutions Engineer: What is Backburner? Backburner is a free software that comes with 3ds Max that allows you to render either animations or single renderings across a network.

Welcome to Autodesk’s Installation and. (it´s hidden in the Maya download, but backburner is the same for. Download backburner 2017 only? Autodesk® Backburner™ can be used with Autodesk products such as, Maya, 3ds Max, Flame, Flare, Flame Assist or Lustre to manage your render jobs and render nodes while network rendering. Autodesk® Backburner™ is a background rendering network system that allows animation scenes to be rendered by many computers working collectively on the same network.

It allows you to take advantage of the CPU power of many PC’s on your network to accomplish the task of rendering a single image or many images. A user can render an image by automatically breaking it up into smaller parts and divvying up the work to many PC’s to work on instead of just one. Why do I need this? A small animation at HD quality can take a very long time to render.

Deldomains.inf Patch. A typical HD rendered frame may be 1280×720 resolution, an may take from a few minutes to several hours to render but since every second of animation requires 30 frames (ie. 30 fps) you can see that when you multiply the rendered frame time by 30 for each second of animation the time it takes to render the complete animation increases very fast. Just as a single high resolution still image may require 5000×4000 pixels and take a single PC 8 hours or more to render. By dividing up the image or animation you can considerably cut down the overall time it takes to render. You can also load up the render queue with alternate views, materials, or multiple render passes. You can also render to this using other Autodesk products like Maya, and composite, etc.

Presently Autodesk Cloud has restricted 3ds Max users from rendering directly to the Autodesk cloud for free, although there are several other Cloud rendering services available just not for free. Overview of how it works: Backburner consists of the Backburner Manager, Backburner Monitor, and Backburner Servers (or render nodes). Backburner Manager: A small executable program that runs on a PC on the network, it can be run on any PC on the network including a render node, although it’s not advised. This software receives render jobs from the client, which it then distributes to the render nodes on the network.

The Backburner Manager maintains status information about its network of Backburner servers. It also maintains a database of submitted, active, and completed jobs. If a render node (server) fails it also will redirect the failed servers’ job to another available server. Backburner Monitor: A small program that can be run on any PC on the network to see and control the Queue of jobs in the manager. This can be run on any PC on the network and there is also a web based version available. Render Nodes: A Render node is a PC that runs (Backburner server) a network version of 3ds Max, and actually renders a job.

Only CPU and RAM are used from this PC, a high-end graphics card is not needed nor is a monitor even needed. Network Folders: You need to setup a common area so all Backburner servers can load the map textures from. You also need a common area that Backburner can write out files to.

Setup a Shared network folder to work from on a network drive. There will be 2 main folders the first will be named Textures, this will have many sub-directories containing the maps and material libraries. The second folder will be named Renderoutput, this will be where all network rendered files are written to.

Assign these drive letters T: (Textures) and R: (Renderoutput), this makes it easier on a network that may be 10 directories deep to not have to use the entire name in each file mapping. Each PC that is running Backburner Server must have Read-Write access to these folders! 3ds MAX Mappings: In the Materials editor make sure that all materials that are being used are in the shared directories otherwise renderings will fail because they won’t be able to find the correct maps. Open up the Configure User paths under Customize menu and add the paths to the network texture maps so that the map files can be found automatically.