Render Farm issues!

Now we have a render farm one may think that everything would go so smoothly with rendering and things would be rendered a lot quicker then rendering from one pc machine. This is the common thought most people had in our class. Over the last couple of weeks we have had many issues with the farm like;

• Only using one CPU out of 128 which makes it useless. (This was resolved)
• Maya jobs keep failing.
• Simple renders taking ages to render out.
• Getting stuck on one frame making the whole job fail.
• Rendering the frames out saying that its done but only to find the images are blank.
• Finding missing frames when its says its complete.

If there's lots of different jobs going at once and more pending then it WILL be quicker to render on a local machine then sending it to the render farm. The old way seems to be more reliable and less hassle providing that we have computers to work on..

This term is probably the most intensive use that the render farm has been put under. There was always going to be some problems as being one of the first to use this. But hopefully issues can be resolved for the next time.