On 2010-03-16 08:20:17 -0700, "Abraham Schneider" <aschneider@(email surpressed)> said:
Sorry, maybe this is a stupid question, but until now we only had Shake
and unlimited render licenses, so I haven't had this problem:
Everyone moving from Shake to Nuke has run into this same issue.
how do I manage a limited number of render licenses of my production
software (in my case: Nuke) without restricting myself too much in the
hosts file?
Buy more Nuke render licenses, render on fewer machines, or define
fewer CPUs per workstation in your host file.
What I'd like to do: install Nuke on as many machines (renderfarm and
user workstations) as possible. Add a +nuke group in the hosts file to
all these machines that have nuke on it. Then I'd like to submit my nuke
scripts with '+nuke=x@100' where x is the number of render licenses
that I bought.
We used to define an 8-core Xserve as having 4 CPUs in the host file,
but when switching to Nuke from Shake we ran into the problem of not
having enough render licenses. To solve the problem temporarily we
redefined the workstations as having 1 CPU instead of 4 and bumped up
the threads and memory count in Nuke to maximise its use. It works well
for certain Nuke jobs (with a lot of 3D rendering) but not all Nuke
jobs. In the end we were tired of rush "licpause" errors and bought a
lot more Nuke render licenses and redefined the render nodes to have 4
CPUs again. Works best, for the most part.
:)
Mat X
The Embassy VFX
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