NRC Controller

The NRC has three menus, File, View and Help. The File menu contains just the Quit command (Ctrl-Q) and the NRC can also normally be quit by closing the window. The Help menu contains the links to the pages you are reading now.

The View menu contains two options:

Log

Shows the Log window.

The icons at the bottom left indicate the severity of information messages presented. From the left they are:

• Informational - General activity messages like loading scenes, rendering frames and the like

• Warning - Messages containing "can't find"

• Error - Messages prefixed with "Error"

• Fatal - Exception messages (code runtime errors)

NRC Preferences

Here is where you will set your initial paths - for content and for plugins. Care should be taken to use a path that all nodes in your network can access. The use of UNC-style path naming is strongly recommended as it is unambiguous, reliable and will work across Windows and OS X machines for NRC. Mapped network drives are also permissible for Windows-only farms provided the same drive name has been used across the network.

Shared Plugins Directory The Shared Plugin Directory is where the plugins your render nodes will use live. If the field has a red tint, check your plugins using the Manage Plugins button. This needs careful attention when you are working in a rendering environment with both Windows machines and Macs. More detail is given on the Shared Plugins Directory page.

Once your nodes have been set up and tasked with scenes to render, clicking the Validate Environment button should hopefully get you green across the board for your nodes, plugins, configs and content. Any time you get a red dot you should verify before starting the render.

For the Validate Environment button to be available the following conditions must be met:

1. A single scene must be selected

2. A node or nodes must be selected

3. The Config field must have a value

4. The Plug-in path must have a value

5. The selected scene must have a content path

6. The selected scene must have an output path

note

You can drag and drop scenes up from the Scenes section onto Nodes

This section contains the machines on your network that are running the LightWave NRC service. There are four columns here:

• OS - The OS of the node

• Node ID - The Identifier for the node as defined at install time

• Task Scene - The scene or scenes that nodes have been tasked with

• Screamernet Status - What the node is doing right now. Before it is tasked, the node will have a status of Ready

At the bottom of this section are four buttons:

• Start Node - Once a Node has been tasked, hitting this button will start the selected node or nodes on the allotted tasks

• Start All/Selected Nodes - Starts all Nodes, or those that have been selected

• Stop Node - Stops the selected nodes immediately

• Stop All Nodes - Stops all nodes immediately

tip

Note that stopping nodes also clears their render queues

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You can drag and drop Nodes onto scenes

The scene queue. Scenes in here are setup for rendering and are tasked to selected nodes by dragging the scene onto them.

• Framing - When checked, the first and last frames of the scene will be rendered before any of the others

• Scene - Name of the scene file

• Start/Range - The start frame value, or range if an arbitrary range has been set

• End - The end frame. Empty if an arbitrary range has been set

• Step - The frequency of frames to render, 1 means every frame, 2 means every other frame and so on

• Progress - How far through the scene has been rendered

The Scene Content Directory should be filled in automatically for each scene but can be overridden. Likewise, the * Image Output Directory* will normally be blank for using the scene's own path, but can equally be overridden.

The NRC Controller now uses the following heuristics when auto-determining the Image Output path for a new scene:

1. If an explicit override path has been defined in the NRC Controller preferences, that is used, and any values in the scene file are summarily ignored;

2. If all defined output paths for all active buffers point to the same location, then that path is used;

3. If the (legacy) 'SaveRGBImagesPrefix' value is set, then its path value is used;

4. If the 'ContentDir' value is present in the scene, then it is used;

5. Finally, the scene file's derived content directory (same value placed into the 'Scene Content Directory' field) will be duplicated into the 'Image Output Directory' field, if feasible.

There are four buttons here:

• Add Scene(s)... - Scenes are added to the queue

note

Scenes can now be dragged and dropped onto the Scene window of NRC.

• Remove Scene - Scenes are removed from the queue

• Start Render - Starts all nodes associated with the selected scene rendering

• Stop Render - Stops the selected scene rendering. If more scenes are queued, work will start on them instead