CRM - Constellation Render Manager

I used to remember when me and my friends back in university, We have been faced with one huge stage during our last finals semester.

Rendering!

Aside from the long rendering time we have to render farm our shot manually across the computer lab. We have to copy the project file, set the frame range manually, and batch render it on every computer which is obviously a very tedious task.

The solution turn out to be a render manager software which can help you handle and distribute render job across networked computer. However, render manager software can be very costly and I wonder if we can make one ourselves.

The answer came through after I work for 4 months in Jakarta. I saw our studio render manager was overloaded and after some thought, I decided to develop our own in-house render manager called Constellation Render Manager (CRM).

CRM consist of 4 core element. The server, client, submitter, and the controller. Each of this component will work individually on each computer but share one configuration and network in order to work.

First one is the CRM server console which will distribute render job and control the which job run on which client. I've run the server for one month and it has shown a very robust reliability without the needs of restarting it.

CRM Server

The next on is the client. The client shown here is specifically engineered to render job for Autodesk Maya. However, I saw that it can expanded to other software in the near future.

CRM Client

Here is the CRM submitter engineered for built in Maya. We can decide how much frame each client will render in Block Divider section while you can cross check the Render Layer that is going to be submitted.

CRM Submitter

The last one and the most crucial part on every render manager is the controller to see the progress on each job, check client status, and to manipulate submitted job.

CRM Controller

This simple render manager has been tested and used to render heavy scene file for the last one month in the studio I work now without significance issues. CRM has performed fast, simple, and reliable.

I will develop CRM more in the near future to be able to handle more software, more intelligence, and even more reliable.

Thank you for reading and I hope you have a nice day.