YES! Renderfarm up and running

It took me nearly all day, but after consulting one source after another I finally got drqueue to run on my computer. It’s actually very easy to do….if someone actually gives you good directions!

The key to make it work for me was setting up the master and slave .confs and creating the etc, logs, and tmp directory in the same nfs shared folder that I had placed my blend file in. Once I did, it worked like a charm!

Here are the basic steps from the beginning. (works for both Linux and freeBSD)

1. Create the user drqueue 2. Run make (in the drqueue source) 3. Go into your .chrc or .bashprofile and set DRQUEUE_ROOT to be /usr/local/drqueue/ 4. make install 5. mount your shared folder where you nfs share to the rest of the network. 6. create, within this folder, logs, etc, and tmp 7. copy the etc directory from /usr/local/drqueue to this one 8. exit the conf files so that the values for logs, etc, and tmp point to the ones you just created. Everything else should point to the corresponding folder under /usr/local/drqueue 9. tell your blender file to save to the nfs’d folder (it helps to mount it at the same place in all computers - /mnt/render works well) 10. Start the master, then slaves, then drqman - it can run on any computer, not just the master 11. Go to computers - you probably want to up the load number to 500 or more (or your best computers may not get used if they are running GUIs or anything else) 12. Go to jobs, right-click and start a new job. The stuff in the next section is pretty self-explanatory 13. Hit submit when you’re done and the magic begins! 14. Hit refresh in the different tabs to make sure it’s working 15. Your animation will be completed in record time!

To see how well it performed, go to my next post!