Rendering with 3dsMAX on amazon EC2 cloud

I’m looking to boost my rendering power Amazon EC2 may be the way forward.

Hunting around the web I found Jud Pratt had made a bunch of videos on the subject of build your own render cloud. Alas Jud’s homepage seems to be down but here are the links to his Vimeo channel. Note that It has been some time since he made these videos, and some aspects of Amazon’s EC2 set-ups may have changed since then…

As well as creating your own virtual machines by hand you can also use an off the self solution from Thinkbox Software to manage it for you.

 

The biggest thing to stress when using EC2 is, make sure you shut everything down when you’re done. There’s a good cgsociety thread here.

Thinkbox software Deadline

Thinkbox are now advertising an out of the box solution with there deadline render manager. Call the VMX (Virtual Machine eXtension) it can manager multiple cloud services and even automatically chooses the most cost effective based on the size of your job.

Jud’s videos

If you want to ‘do it your self’ you can try the setup in Juds videos.

https://vimeo.com/album/1674399

note: add “all ICMP” to the inbound rules (part 1 – 4:14). If not, the servers will not see the manager.

[weaver_vimeo 27993626] [weaver_vimeo 27994510] [weaver_vimeo 27994567] [weaver_vimeo  27996749] [weaver_vimeo 27996798]

Launching Maya Backburner EC2 Render

[weaver_vimeo 28087882]

Notes

Solution to MAPPED NETWORK ISSUE, from Jud’s home page:
* I have to use \\(ip-address)\(drive-name) instead of \\(computer-name)\(drive-name) to get the network drive worked.

Links

Theres a C4D setup here

http://cosmocyte.com/animation-techniques/

Jud’s post http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=1002445