So a lot of folks are jumping on the Arnold renderer now that it's
available for public release.
Congrats to Marcos for a full-on public release!
So Arnold is currently provided as both a Maya and Softimage
plugin, perhaps others. But most folks contacting me so far
have all been using the Maya plugin.
RENDERING WITH THE ARNOLD MAYA PLUGIN
=====================================
You can use submit-maya.pl and/or submit_maya.py to render
with the Arnold plugin in Maya by simply enabling Arnold
in your scene file, and setting the "Renderer" prompt to 'default'.
But you may gain more flexibility with the command line flags
if you add "arnold" to the list of options for the Renderer: prompt.
To do this, just modify this line in your maya submit script:
Renderer: "default,maya(sw),mentalray(mr),mentalray-standalone(mi),mi-gen(mi),..."
..and just add 'arnold' to the list, e.g.
Renderer: "default,arnold,maya(sw),mentalray(mr),mentalray-standalone(mi),mi-gen(mi),..."
With that change, 'arnold' will show up in the drop down list
for the Renderer: prompt, and you can then choose that to render
with arnold, and use all the Arnold renderer command flags that you
can see with 'Render -r arnold -help'.
RENDERING WITH THE ARNOLD STANDALONE "KICK" RENDERER
====================================================
OK, so Rush has been including a submit-arnold.pl render script
since 2001 (used to render Paul Debevec's "Parthenon" project),
which was for a long time the only way to run the Arnold renderer.
While the 'kick' command still exists, it's changed syntax a bit.
The plugin installation of Arnold /includes/ the separate
standalone 'kick' render command, which you can use to render
Arnold's own '.ass' files, which are similar to renderman .rib
files, or mental ray .mi files.
It's my understanding that to now use .ass files for rendering,
you'd have them pre-generated on disk; one .ass file per frame,
and the idea is to invoke 'kick' on each .ass file to render them..
again, much like .rib files.
I need to rework the submit-arnold.pl script to do this,
because the old script assumes kick's older approach, where there's
one .ass file for the scene, and you tell kick which frame to
render,
a technique similar to mental ray "incremental mi files".
From what I can tell from 'kick -help', I no longer see
an option for specifying frames to render from the ass file,
which I take to mean this 'incremental' format is no longer
supported, and it would appear the way things are done now
is with one .ass file per frame.
I'll follow up with a new submit-arnold script in a few days
to support this.
In the mean time, those of you that want to experiment with
the standalone 'kick' renderer can use the 'submit-generic'
script to render .ass files in parallel. What follows are
some instructions on how to do this, until I follow up with
a new 'user friendly' submit-arnold script for using 'kick':
1) Run the submit-generic.pl script from your server
2) Fill out the submit form this way:
Shell: perl <-- important
Job Title: ARNOLD_TEST
Frames: 1-100
Batch Frames: 1
Log Directory: /some/empty/directory/on/the/server/%s
Make Log Directory: yes
Commands:
$ENV{PATH}="/mnt/server/solidangle/mtoa/2014/bin:$PATH";
$shaders="/mnt/server/solidangle/mtoa/2014/shaders";
$assfile="/mnt/projects/test/ASS/foo.$ENV{RUSH_PADFRAME}.ass";
system("kick -l $shaders -dw -dp -v 6 -g 2.2 -i $assfile");
Cpus: +any=10@100
3) Hit submit.
Things you'll need to change in the above are shown in red.
The assumption here is the files are named e.g.
"foo.0001.ass", "foo.0002.ass", etc.
all 4 digit padded frame numbers on the per-frame files.
It could maybe use some error checking at the end, but for a quick +
dirty
solution, that should get renders out as shown.
Modify the kick command and parameter flags to taste, using whatever
flags
are appropriate for your renders. See 'kick -help' for a full list
of all the command
line flags your version of 'kick' supports. You can find docs for
the kick command line here:
https://support.solidangle.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=8390077
I wasn't able to find full docs of the 'kick -help' command there,
but I'll
list some of the most important flags for rendering here:
-i <s> Input .ass file
-o <s> Output filename
-of <s> Output format (none jpg tiff8 tiff16 tiff32)
-r <n n> Image resolution
-t <n> Threads
-v <n> Verbose level (0..6)
-nw <n> Maximum number of warnings
-dw Disable render window (recommended for batch rendering)
-dp Disable progressive rendering (recommended for batch rendering)
-l <s> Add search path for plugin libraries
-nstdin Ignore input from stdin
-nokeypress Don't wait for keypress after rendering
-sl Skip license check (assume license is not available)
where <n>=integer, <f>=float, <s>=string
That's not a complete 'kick -help' list, just ones I
cherry picked that seem to be very relevant for distributed batch rendering.
Anyway, I'll follow up in a few days with a proper rewrite of the
submit-arnold script that has
"user friendly" prompts and such.
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