Why Royal Render?

Error resistant

RR has many different features to check for errors. Please check the feature page for more details.
One of Royal Renders main test render farms is the Institute of Animation. They have about 80 Students who are working on 20 projects at the same time. Rendering with Maya, Houdini, 3dsmax, Nuke, After FX, Renderman, Arnold, Cinema and Modo. Everyone wants to render first, there is no render TD with years of production experience, often creative non-technical artists are submitting and checking jobs. Every project has its own pipeline and structure, there is no “known issues” list of things to avoid. Perhaps they check if their jobs are rendering - or not. Therefore RR has to catch all kinds of possible errors, no job should be able to halt the farm.

Unique Features

RR has unique features we invented. Some of them are already copied by other managers, but not all:

• Preview images: Send a bunch of jobs in the evening. RR renders and shows a few frames of each job first. Check them and leave the company knowing that all jobs will render fine.
• Fast sequence viewer: RR caches a your rendered sequence during render. E.g. an HD render with 500 frames is loaded within 20s.
• Image checks: Are the frames really rendered? Are they readable? Is a render tile missing?
• 3 existing frames modes on submission: a) Delete all frames and render    b) Render only missing frames    c) Over-render all existing frames.
• User Approval: Pause job after a few frames or after all frames (before post-scripts) and continue after user has approved the job.
• Shared Executables/plugins:
  RR is partly configured with plugin folders (VRay for Maya, Redshift , MtoA, SitoA, HtoA, ) and even some render apps folders (Arnold Kick, Redshift). These folders are synced to each rrClient automatically. Advantages:
  1) No need to install these plugins or apps on each machine.
  2) Support different renderer versions at the same time.
  3) Saves a lot of traffic and runs way more reliable compared to plugins/executables accesses directly from a network drive.
• Intelligent Clients:
  • Detect if a renderer froze or crashed, keep/store information about CPU and memory usage per frame.
  • Auto-shutdown if idle and wake-up on new jobs.
  • Auto-cache texture files (Available for Softimage out of the box, other render apps require custom scripts for your pipeline)
  • Workstation artist-client synergy:
    • Enable on logout
    • Disable on high CPU usage or high memory usage
    • Enable after x minutes with no CPU usage (lunch, meeting, gone home anf forgot to enable)
    • Use less cores if artist logged in
    • Disable during workign hours
    • Allow only (e.g.) Nuke jobs during artists working hours
    • Disable if artists starts application X
    • Wake up machine before working hours of the artist

• User Approval: Pause job after a few frames or after all frames (before post-scripts) and continue after user has approved the job.
• Render large images in slices to use more machines on one frames. Slices are auto-assembled. Single frames or whole sequences.
• Keep track of renderer licenses use (e.g. “Nuke” or “Nuke Plugin Sapphire”). Auto-reduce farm licenses as long as a license is used by someone else. Allow artists to checkout a license.
• Add custom python commands to the control (manage) application to be used via right-click on jobs or clients.
• 3dsmax (Even Backburner does not support this):
  • Render all scene states with one 3dsmax scene.
  • Render all 3D stereo camera views with just one scene.
  • Render VRay GI prepass and render mode with one scene.
  • Render Elements into subfolders

Created by an artist that worked with tough commercial deadlines

The lead developer of Royal Render has worked as Shading&Lighting TD and compositing artist for many productions and he has developed shaders for Softimage (ICE volume shaders). Therefore one of the main differences is that RR was not build for Pipeline TDs and render wranglers as you find them in larger companies, it was build to make the live of an artist easier. The lead developer understands what artists need as he needed the features himself. Many creative artists requests have turned into a feature, but in a different and better way than non-technical artist or a pure application developer could think of. It’s the synergy that counts.