Maya 2014 is installed on Zeus HPC (zeus.coventry.ac.uk)

I wrote a simple script for frame-based rendering parallelism, which can be found on HPC in

/share/apps/autodesk/render.sh

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Usage:

1. Upload ready-to-render maya *.mb  scene file (with all other files if required) to HPC in your home folder (say, to  /home/ax4444/mayatrial , can use quick HPC tools on W:ECSTUDENTHPC, e.g. WinSCP for uploading files)
2. Connect in a ssh-terminal (PuTTY) to HPC, change to maya project folder (i.e. cd ~/mayatrial)
3. copy render.sh script there if need to change some extra rendering parameters (resolution, camera etc):
   cp /share/apps/autodesk/render.sh ./
4. Decide on how many frames you need to render and how many compute nodes of zeus to use, i.e. to render 100 frames starting from frame 1 on 10 compute nodes of HPC, issue command:
   srun -N10 -t 24:00:00 --exclusive ./render.sh 1 100 mymayafile.mb &
5. This will put the job into execution with time limit of 24 hours. If more time is needed use “long” queue, i.e. srun -N10 -t 24:00:00 -p long --exclusive ./render.sh 1 100 mymayafile.mb &
6. render.sh script will automatically split required Nr of  frames between 10 compute nodes and will launch Mental Ray renderer  on each compute node. On each of 10 nodes 8 CPUs will be used for rendering each single frame.
7. Resulting sequence of images (png files, change output format in render.sh if needed) is saved in the “output” folder which is created automatically. Alternatively you can edit render.sh to change output folder to, say ~/public_html, which will allow to see rendered images via web-browsed by pointing it to http://zeus.coventry.ac.uk/~yourusername/.
8. Check the output of “squeue” command to see that the job is running in the HPC queue. Once the job finishes (or even before that), images can be downloaded to your local PC.
9. During rendering the script (by default) will create output folder in your ~/public_html directory, so that you can see the results of rendering in your browser at  http://zeus.coventry.ac.uk/~yourusername/.  “movie.html” page created automatically in that directory will stream all currently rendered images as an animated sequence. You have to reload the page (Ctrl+R) for it to reread newly rendered frames.

Alex Pedcenko.

P.S. Take a look at the example of the output: http://zeus.coventry.ac.uk/~aa3025/inkDrop.ma/