This is meant to be a general guide on how to render for the On-A-Slant project. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that it is a little hacked together. We're interested in rendering the frames, not having a elegant rendering farm. So there are some…rough edges, shall we say.

First, there are two main sites to find information about what's currently rendering. At the bottom of http://hrothgar.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu/maya/, clicking “Show Current Statistics” will show which machines are presently rendering, including the frame, start time, and estimated progress.

http://hrothgar.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu/maya/status/ shows the current status, and a list of the last 1000 frames rendered. You can click on the links for each frame to see what the results are. To save space, the non-watermarked image (i.e., no frame number in the top left corner) are generally not saved, as we don't have the space for such things. But the watermarked image is always available until deleted by you.

First, log into Hrothgar via SSH. If you don't have an account, contact support@cs.ndsu.edu.

For this project, I've found Byobu to be a useful tool. It's essentially a front-end for GNU Screen, with a couple of nice features.

So first, type Byobu on the command line. You'll see status information near the bottom of the screen, along with a list of shells presently open. Control-a d (type Contol-a at the same time, followed by just typing d) will detach the current session. You can then log in at a different time, type 'byobu' and the session will continue. For rendering, you often let a session hang in the background, which is why Byobu is useful.

To create a second shell with Byobu, type Control-a c. You'll now see two shells at the bottom. To create more, type Control-a c again. To move between shells, type Control-a n or Control-a p (for next and previous). If you wish to rename a shell, you can do so by typing Control-a A. You're then prompted to change the name.

Once logged into Hrothgar, you should navigate to /opt/maya-daemon/bin/. This directory has an assortment of scripts and other resources.

Rendering occurs within the 21 workstations in the 244 Linux Lab. A script exists to copy the necessary Maya files over to the 244 lab. To run this script, type:

perl svn-update-244.perl

This'll just copy over files that have changed, so it should be quick (a few minutes). Be aware of any messages in red, as they're warnings, and are probably worth reading.