Farm Foreman

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About Farm Foreman

Farm Foreman is a Windows batch script for render farming Autodesk Maya 3D animation. It automates the rendering across multiple networked computers, saving significant amounts of time in getting large projects done. It's also a great alternative to expensive commercial render farming software.

Helpful features

Time saver

Whether running on just a few computers or several dozen, Farm Foreman slices an animation's render time down to a manageable size. For instance, a task that might normally take a month and a half on a single computer can finish in under 24 hours on 40 computers. More worker computers can be "hired" to the team at any point to speed up the process.

Smart workers

Rather than dividing an animation into sets of frames for each worker computer to render on its own, Farm Foreman workers act as a team to finish the job together reliably and quickly. They run in parallel, each one rendering a single frame at a time, continually aware of which frames the others are currently processing, and moving on to the next available frame when ready. This ensures all workers keep processing until the very end and no frame is rendered twice.

Automated recovery

If a computer shuts down unexpectedly or crashes, the others will continue where it left off, making the most of available time and resources. Once they've rendered the last frame, Farm Foreman workers automatically go back and check over each other's work, leaving no missing or unfinished frames behind.

Queuing system

When a job is done, Farm Foreman doesn't quit, it moves on to the next one in the queue. Once all the jobs are finished, it remains idle until more are added. This allows for multiple animation projects to be rendered, including multiple camera angles within projects. Farm Foreman even uploads all the rendered frames to an FTP server for remote access and sends a notification email upon finishing each job.

Requirements

Farm Foreman requires two or more worker computers on the same local network with Windows 7 or later. Also required is a network-attached storage drive on a non-worker computer; this acts as central storage for the project files, queued jobs, render logs, and output frames. You should also be somewhat comfortable with the Windows command line or batch scripting. Farm Foreman is built for Autodesk Maya 2012, but should work on later versions too.

How to use it

1. Open the FarmForeman.bat script and customize it to your own needs. At a minimum, you'll need to change these things:
   • The network drive location, username, and password.
   • The path to Maya's bin folder on the workers (must be in the same location on each worker).
   • The path to Maya's Render executable on the workers (must be in the same location on each worker).
   • The number of processor threads available on the workers (must be the same number on each worker or the lowest common number). If your processors support hyper-threading, then they'll have twice as many threads as cores; for example, a quad-core processor would have 8 threads and you'd specify -mr:rt 8 in the script.
   • The FTP server, username, and password for uploading completed job output files.
   • The SMTP server for sending notification emails when jobs are complete. Depending on how restrictive the server is, you may need additional parameters, such as a particular From email address that the server will allow.
2. Put the Farm Foreman program folder onto the network drive.
3. Copy your Maya project folder onto the network drive. Open the scene file in Maya from there and do a small test render to verify that it works in the new location.
4. Put a text file containing the specifications for your render job into Farm Foreman's JobQueue folder on the network drive. See the example file in the JobQueue folder for info about the proper syntax and file naming.
5. Run FarmForeman.bat from the network drive on each of the workers. They will begin rendering and you can see their collective progress in real-time by opening the log file in the JobLogs folder.
6. To queue additional render jobs, just add the project folders to the network drive, test them, and put new job text files in the JobQueue folder. The workers will detect the jobs and begin rendering when they're ready.