User manual APPLE QMASTER 3

[. . . ] Apple Qmaster 3 User Manual K Apple Inc. Copyright © 2007 Apple Inc. Your rights to the software are governed by the accompanying software license agreement. The owner or authorized user of a valid copy of Final Cut Studio software may reproduce this publication for the purpose of learning to use such software. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted for commercial purposes, such as selling copies of this publication or for providing paid for support services. [. . . ] Â Use the Choose buttons to navigate to and choose the location of the Maya project and scene files for this job. Â In the Frames region, enter a Start and End frame for the job. The available settings correspond to commonly used Maya command options. See the Maya documentation for more information about all the Maya command settings. 5 As needed, set the following options for the batch in the Apple Qmaster window: Â Submit To: Choose a cluster to process this batch. Â Working Directory: If relevant, enter the working directory (from which you want the command to be executed) in the Working Directory column. The higher the priority, the sooner and faster this batch will be processed relative to other batches. If you use Maya plug-ins, you can change this by removing or renaming /Library/Application\ Support/Apple\ Qmaster/MayaCommandPlugin. commandPlugin/Contents/Resources/ mayascript. Advanced users can customize MayaScript to suit their environment and workflow. Media Management in Maya Projects Most Maya assets are contained to the project directory. If your project uses external files, you will need to relink them when the project is moved to the shared volume. It may be necessary to retarget your assets once you move your project to the shared volume. If you are handing this project to a cluster administrator, you should save the file in Maya ASCII (. ma) as well. This way, it can be edited to fix path problems without intimate knowledge of using Maya. 17 Mental Ray for Maya Submissions and Other Options: To use Mental Ray for Maya renderer, add -r mr to the options field. You must have a licensed copy of Maya on each node in the cluster to use the Mental Ray renderer. Apple Qmaster does not use Maya Satellite, so in this regard, there is no difference in Maya Complete vs. If the node in question has only one CPU, the number of satellite CPUs does not apply to Apple Qmaster. You might want to change this value depending on the type of computers in your cluster. In a homogeneous cluster environment, say of Mac Pro or PowerMac Quad systems, you would change this value to 4, as there are four CPUs per node, and some Maya operations might be faster with more threads. So, if you have nodes that vary in the number of CPUs, you will have to be careful with the number of threads you use. If you want to selectively enable the number of threads a node uses, you must use a wrapper. To force Apple Qmaster to heed Maya plug-in warnings, remove or rename the following file: /Library/Application\ Support/Apple\ Qmaster/ MayaCommandPlugin. commandPlugin/Contents/Resources/mayascript. Submitting Batches with the Generic Render Command You can use the Generic Render command in Apple Qmaster for the distributed processing of projects from other frame-based rendering applications (such as After Effects and LightWave). The plug-in dialog allows you to adjust parameters, and to add more command-line options to each job. 18 To submit a batch of files for processing using the Generic Render command: 1 In the Apple Qmaster window, choose Generic Render from the pop-up menu, then click the Add ( + ) button to add a job. [. . . ] If no -option is entered, the values from the application's preferences file, in ~/Library/Preferences, are used (which are the values of the most recent job submitted). Use to specify the working directory path (from which the command should be executed). Use to specify the number of seconds before Apple Qmaster can quit when looking for a cluster. The default value is 0, which puts no limit on the timeout and allows Apple Qmaster to browse the network for as long as it needs to find the cluster. [. . . ]