Render Settings


Priority


Jobs with higher priority are usually send first.


There are some exceptions (see rrConfig, tab Jobs):

  • You can setup RR to average clients between projects, so each project gets the same amount of render power, no matter if one project uses priority 60 and the other project uses priority 50 for all its jobs.
  • The preview rendering stage of a job has a +20 higher priority.
  • You can tell a client to prefer e.g. Nuke jobs, no matter if Softimage jobs have a higher priority.


Abort Jobs with lower priority


After the rrServer receives the new job, it will abort all jobs that are rendering on the assigned clients and that have a lower priority than the new job.


Render Preview First


Before RR renders all frames, it will render a few frames of each job first.

See Preview Render


Do Not Check For Frames


Usually the rrServer checks each job and counts the frames done.

If there is a frame missing, the server tries to render it.


There are some jobs that do not produce output images or it is not possible to tell RR the right image name.

Then you can enable this setting.

Each frame of the job is send once. The server does not check if there is a frame missing.


There are two different modes which you can change in rrConfig:

  1. Do not overwrite existing frames.
  2. Do not care about existing frames at all.


Little Job


Little jobs are send to clients even if the client is disabled.

They will use less CPUs if the client is disabled.


Start Multiple Instances


A client can start multiple instances of the same render.

E.g. if it receives the frame frame 1-8, then the rrClient can up to start 4 render instances, each render instance will render 2 frames (1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8 ).


You should consider using multiple render threads on a client instead for most render jobs.

A seperated render thread can take its own job with a different frame range.


GPU required


Not all machines are able to process GPU rendering.

Even if you can login on the machine and use the GPU, it might not work with RR.

Please see rrHelp section Infos/GPU rendering.


The only function of this switch is to tell the rrServer NOT to send this job to machines that have not GPU setup that works for RR.

Each Client has a config setting "GPU available if client runs as service" and "GPU requires user X to be logged in". 



Number of Preview Frames


Sets the number of preview frames shown on the job information page at rrControl/rrWebsite.



Preview- Contiguous Frames


Instead of using a wide spread of frames from your sequence, this option uses the first, last and a middle segment of the sequence.

This is useful if you want to check for example the noise of contiguous frames



Sequence Divide


See rrTerms/ Sequence Divide. 



Max Clients at a time


You can limit the maximum number of clients that should render at the same time for a job.


Note: Do not use this if you have not enough licenses for your render application.

Set the number of render licenses in rrConfig


Required Memory GB


Set the minimum amount of RAM required for the job.

If a client does not have that much available memory, then job is not send to the client.

If a client has multiple job threads running, then the server takes care that the summed "Required Memory GB" will not be higher than the clients available memory.


Auto-get Required Memory


The server collects the job memory usage of all clients while they render.

If the memory usage is higher than "Required Memory GB", then "Required Memory GB" is increased.



Min file size KB

If the rendered file is smaller than this setting, then RR will rename the file and re-render it.

If you have not set any value (=0), then RR calculates a value based on the image verification settings in rrConfig.

If you do not want RR to automatically set this value, then set it to e.g. 1KB for this job   or   set the size value in rrConfig for the image type you use to 0.



Max Frame Time


The client is able to abort renderings if the render time is too long.

The value is in minutes per frame.

The value has to be set higher than 1 to have an effect.


Note:

For now, the client is only able to check the time for the whole sequence it got.

For example the client got frame 20-24 to render (5 frames). You have set the max frame time is set to 10 minutes.

If the client takes more than 5*10=50 minutes to render these frames, it will abort it and log an error message. .


Max Crashes


If the job crashes this often, the rrServer disables the job.



Max Thresholds


If the number of thresholds reached of all clients are higher than the job setting "Max Thresholds", then the complete job is disabled.

Otherwise a job could be started over and over and is aborted over and over again.

Which is a waste of render time.


Thresholds are reached if ...

  •    ...a client renders more time than the job setting "Max Render time".
        (Useful if you want to prevent that an artist send a non-optimized job by accident. E.g. 2000 frames and a frame time of 20h could block the farm for some time.)
  •    ...the job takes more memory than the machine has.
        In this case the clients aborts the job because of its config setting "Abort if system memory gets low".