Prebaked RIBs - Possible Solution to Dropped Frames

[jspada20]

I ran into an issue a few weeks ago when I first started using RMS on the farm that I thought would be useful to document. While rendering a large sequence of frames, many of the render nodes errored out on the job while others finished. The reason I believe was that the render nodes were overwriting each others RIB outputs for the geometry and other scene assets. This is an easily fixed problem. To correct it you can pre-bake out your scene data before sending it to the farm. This way, instead of writing out new RIB files for each node, the data already exists and the nodes can reference it.

This is done by using RIB archive nodes in Maya. Selecte all the objects in your scene you want to bake out then click...

Renderman->RIB Archives->Create Node and Write Archives

This will take every frame in your scene and write out a RIB file. This prebaking takes some time to do but it will save you time in the long run.

It is worth mentioning that if you change anything that is contained within the RIB archive, you must rewrite it. To do this go to your outliner and select the RIB archive nodes you want to update and click the Update Archive button.

More information can be found here: http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/cu ... eNode.html

and

http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/cu ... kflow.html

*Disclaimer - I am still learning Renderman for Maya myself so if any of this information looks off or have useful information to add please post it!*