Submit-Mayatile Script

Sometimes frames take so long to render, it's difficult to get decent feedback when tweaking the lights or objects in a scene. In such a case, it's desirable to have multiple machines render different parts of each frame as 'tiles' that can quickly be rendered in parallel, then comped together.

'submit-maya6-tile' splits each frame up into 'tiles' and renders them separately on different machines, and then using ImageMagick's 'montage' and 'composite' commands, recombines the tiles into a single image. It does this by submitting a Rush job with floating point frame numbers, where the integer part of the frame number is the frame being rendered, and the fractional part of the frame number is the tile number.

For instance, a 3x3 tile render will submit a job where each frame has 9 parts, plus a tenth to do the compositing operation, eg:

    0001.00  -- tile #1
    0001.01  -- tile #2
    0001.02  -- tile #3
    :
    0001.07  -- tile #8
    0001.08  -- tile #9
    0001.09  -- composite operation (composites tiles 1-9 into a single image)

Dependencies

This script assumes your scene file has the Render Globals set to use the "name.#.ext" filename format, and that the freeware ImageMagick 'montage' and 'composite' tools are available to do the compositing. (See their webpage for download info. ImageMagic supports all the platforms rush supports; windows, linux, osx.. Redhat comes with all ImageMagick tools on the install CDs if you install the image processing option)

Example Use

After filling out the submit form, and submitting the job, you should end up with a Rush job, where each frame in the job represents a different tile in the image. How many tiles you break the image into depends on what you specify for the Xtiles: and YTiles: prompts.

What follows shows the Rush frames report for a simple 2x2 (4 tile) render, and the resulting image tiles and composite image that results.

Rush Frame List

STAT FRAME TRY HOSTNAME PID JOBID START ELAPSED NOTES Done 0001.00 1 geneva 1512 ontario.103 07/02,19:27:19 00:00:15 TILE#1 Done 0001.01 1 ontario 1284 ontario.103 07/02,19:27:19 00:00:15 TILE#2 Done 0001.02 1 bubble 16001 ontario.103 07/02,19:27:19 00:00:14 TILE#3 Done 0001.03 1 geneva 1600 ontario.103 07/02,19:27:19 00:00:17 TILE#4 Done 0001.04 1 ontario 1893 ontario.103 07/02,19:27:38 00:00:01 COMP



Four Tiles Rendered on Separate Machines
tile-000.0001.tga (rush frame 0001.00)	tile-001.0001.tga (rush frame 0001.01)
tile-002.0001.tga (rush frame 0001.02)	tile-003.0001.tga (rush frame 0001.03)



Final Composite Image

out.0001.tga (rush frame 0001.04)

4x4 Tiled Render Example (16 tiles total)

Here's another example, showing what happens when you just change the settings for XTiles:4 and YTiles:4. The result is a 16 tile image in a 4x4 arrangement. Doing this creates a 17 frame Rush job; the first 16 "rush frames" render the 4x4 tiles, and the 17th "rush frame" comps the other 16 into a single image.

What's shown here is a screen shot showing the user's desktop after middle-clicking on each of the frames in Irush, which brings up the separate tile images in the ImageMagick 'display' program, and the resulting comp.

4x4 Tiles (16 total)



Final Composite Image

out.0001.tga (rush frame 0001.16)