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• What do you need to know before you begin? (Maya Project )

1) You must use Maya's project structure. All textures and references that you use in your scenes must be contained within the project folder.
2) Your scene must point to locations in the Maya project as well (for example, if you're using a texture, the "image name" should look something like "textures\myImage.jpg". If it looks more like "C:\Documents and Settings\morelanj\My Documents\Maya\projects..." then the textures won't show up in the render.
3) While you can set up your project folder however you like, it is required that all .ma & .mb files are located in the "scenes" subfolder.
4) Be sure to set things up in the Render Settings window (Frame/Animation Ext, Image Format, Start Frame, End Frame, Frame Padding, Camera, Image Size).
5) In addition to setting the camera in the Render Settings window, It is important to ensure that no other cameras in the scene are set to "Renderable". The Renderable check box can be found under the cameraShape tab in "Output Settings". It is important to note that even the persp, top, front, & side cameras can be set to "Renderable" so it is important to check all cameras and make sure only the desired camera is selected.
6) For Maya renders, TeraDRE currently only supports Maya Software Renderer. Mental Ray is not supported at this time.
7) Only standard Maya plugins work. It may be possible to install non-standard plugins on the TeraDRE machines, but this could take a lot of time and may not work. In general, it's a safer bet to only use plugins that are included in a standard Maya Complete installation.
8) TeraDRE currently uses Maya8.5. Scenes saved from other versions of Maya may or may not render properly.

• How to use TeraDRE (for Purdue Students)

1) Go to http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/userinfo/forms.cfm to fill out a "Research Computing Account Request".
2) You will be asked to login using your Purdue Career Account login.
3) Applicant Tab: Fill in your email address and check the Undergraduate Student box (or Graduate Student if appropriate). Then click Continue.
4) Supervisor Tab: Fill in your supervisor's name. If you're using the system for an undergrad course, use the course instructor's name. (Note: you must click the "Search" button to find the name in Purdue's database. You can't simply press enter.) Then Click Continue.
5) Science Tab: Choose "343 Visualization, Graphics, and Image Processing". Then click Continue.
6) Systems Tab: Check the "Condor" box. Several other boxes will be automatically selected once you choose "Condor". Then Click Continue.
7) Options Tab: You should not need to change any values in this tab, simply check the "I agree" box and click Continue to submit your application. (Note: you will not need more than 1 Gigabyte of space on this account. All renders will be stored in a seperate shared location. Setting a value higher than 1 Gigabyte in the "Disk Space Needed" box may cause delays in creating your account.)
8) Once your account is created, you will need to obtain an RSA key (this is 2 files, userkey.pem & usercert.pem) from ITaP Security Analyst. Please contact teradre[at]purdue.edu for more details.
9) Go to TeraDRE website . Click the "Launch TeraDRE" Tab. Then Click "Launch" to start the Java Web Start application. (Note: You must have java installed)
10) Once the TeraDRE application launches, go to File > Preferences. Fill in your Purdue Career login under "Name". Enter the location of your userkey.pem & usercert.pem under "Cert Location". Sandbox Name should be set to "teraDRE_tmp". Default Grid Domain should be set to "cert:purdue.edu". Fill in your TG Project Number (if you are enrolled in an undergrad course, this will be provided to you). Set Cache Directory to writeable space on your computer (temporary files will be stored here). Cache Direcotory Size can be left at 100. Then Click Apply.
11) Go to File > New Project > Maya.
12) Files Tab: Add your Maya Project. This can be done by either clicking the "Add" button and browsing to your Maya Project directory, or by simply dragging your Maya Project directory into the workspace (where it says "File Input".)
13) Arguments Tab: click the box next to "Input_File" and browse for your maya scene (.mb or .ma file located in the "scenes" directory of your Maya Project.) Click the box next to "Project_Directory" and browse for your Maya Project directory (normally this will be the same directory you added in the previous step, but since TeraDRE supports multiple projects, you must spcify the project specify this.) Set Inital & Final frame. Set the "Output FileType" & "Output FileBasename". You can normally leave Output RGB, Alpha, Depth, & ImagePlanes set to false. Set the output Width & Height.
14) Click "Framelist" to open the framelist editor and select all the frames that you wish to be rendered. Then click Close.
15) Options Tab: Enter your email address where you wish to be notified of your output location. You can optionally enter your cell phone number for a text message & web link if your phone supports these features. (Note: if you don't know your SMS Provider, the @teleflip.com option normally works for all US cell phones.) "Number Frames Per Job" is the number of frames that will be rendered on each machine. Due to the nature of TeraDRE, it is recomended that this number remain low.
16) Go to Run > Login
17) Enter the password for your userkey.pem (if any. by default there is none.) Then click OK. You should then see output something like "Login... grid domain creating credential... Have credential"
18) Go to Run > Submit. Your job will then be uploaded to the system and rendered. You will recieve job notification via the contact info you entered in the "Options" tab.
Send any questions/comments to teradre[at]purdue.edu

• Getting Started with TeraDRE

1) Introduction The TeraDRE is a grid based distributed rendering application. It enables users to submit rendering requests at this time to both the Purdue's TeraGrid condor resource and to a local Purdue Grid resource. Job are submitted and retrieved from the grid resources using Globus technology. The application supports POVRay, Maya, Blender and Gelato at this time with many more rendering engines planned for future releases. If you have questions about the TeraDRE feel free to email teradre[at]purdue.edu.
2) Launch From the TeraDRE launch page, the TeraDRE application is launched via Java WebStart. At startup you will be presented with a security notice about the application running on your computer. Click OK/Run depending on the platform.
3) Setting Preferences If this is the first time that you have used the TeraDRE application you need to setup the preferences. These preferences are stored on the computer where you use the application. The form will automatically fill in information with some default values. The default grid domain is used when you login to the grid to submit a job. This value will set the default value for the login dialog. Once you have completed the changes to the preferences click on Apply to save the data to the local computer. At anytime you can click on Default to reset these settings to the default values.
4) Login At this point you have the application running on your computer. The next step is to test the logging into the grid. To login click on Run->Login. The TeraDRE uses the grid to supply the computational cycles needed to rendering animations frames. In order to login to the grid, users must be able to generate a proxy certificate by some means and submit that certificate to the grid gatekeepers. The TeraDRE was designed to submit jobs to multiple grids each having slightly different ways to generating proxy certificates. Different grids are represented in the TeraDRE as grid domains. Grid domains map a method of generating a proxy with the gatekeepers for that grid. There are two grid domains that are currently supported by the TeraDRE. The first is the Purdue Grid and the second is the TeraGrid. If you click on the drop down menu on the dialog box you will see there are several choices. At this time the choices are a little cryptic as they are encoded grid domain:specific mechanism. If you have your certificates installed locally in the .globus directory in you home directory then you can use cert:* domains to generate a proxy certificate. The myproxy:* domains are remote servers that can generate a proxy based upon a user name and password.
5) New project In order to use the TeraDRE you must define a project for your rendering project. To define a new project select File->New, then select the renderer that you wish to use. The TeraDRE supports several render engines at this time. Each render engine has different arguments and constrains. Once you have created a new project the project panel will be loaded. At the top of this panel there is a text box for the project name. This is the name of your project, which defaults to (RenderEngine Name)_(Unique Key). You can change the name of the project if you wish but it is a best practice to leave the unique key portion such that if you submit to a share resource there is not a name collision with the projects at this time. This will be changed in future version. At this point add the files that are needed. To do this you can either click Add or drag and drop the files into the project. As a suggestion it is easier if your rendering projects are contained in a directory. Though this is not a requirement for the TeraDRE, it is a good way to manage your rendering projects. After you have loaded the files into the TeraDRE you will want to set the arguments for the project. Click on the Arguments tab and a list of all of the supported arguments will be presented to you. At first inspection you may find that not all the possible arguments are support for each rendering engine at this time. If you have a specific argument that you need, send email to teradre[at]purdue.edu and it may be added in the next release. The major parameters that you will have to set are the input file and the frame list when you are getting started. When selecting the input file, you will be presented with a file selection dialog that uses the files you have loaded into the project. Select the appropriate input file for the rendering engine and click Open. The next major parameter to set is the framelist. A framelist is a list of all frames you specify to render. To do this select the frame list and click on the check boxes of the frames you want to specify. Typically you will want to render all the frames so click on Select All. Depending on the render engine, the frame list may be a inclusive sequential list of frames starting with initial frame and ending with the final frame. But some rendering engines are file based, in that each frame is associated with a file found in the input. In this case will have to specify the filelist argument then the frame list. Additional project options can be specified. Specifying an email and selecting the notify options will send you an email when the project starts and completes. Additionally you can select the option to generate a preview animation. This options will post process the renderings into an AVI movie that will allow you to preview. To access this AVI movie, click on the link in the email. This will take you to a web location that contains some additional information. If the sms option is specified, the TeraDRE will send you a sms message to your cell phone to notify you that your project is complete. In addition if the generate movie option is selected and your cell phone has the ability to play media files, you will be able to preview the animation on your cell phone. An additional option that can be set is the number of frame to render per job. The TeraDRE batches the number of frames to render with each job in order to increase the throughput of the system. A rule of thumb on setting this value is to consider how long it takes to render a single frame of your project. If the value is larger than 15 min then a better setting is to have 1 frame per job. If the time is short then increase this value till the total about of time is roughly 15min. The reason why 15min is a key value is that the TeraDRE uses opportunistic cycle scavenging technology that will claim unused computational cycles. On average there currently is a higher percentage chance that a job will get 15min of runtime before it is evicted. The TeraDRE echoes some status information to the panel below the project panel. This information is useful for know what the TeraDRE is doing when you click a button or if there is an error. If you encounter trouble, you can copy and paste the contents of this panel in an email to teradre[at]purdue.edu . This will aid in trouble shooting issues. The status tab supplies information about the status of your project as your project is running. You can update this status information by clicking on the Run->Status menu. In addition you can select the Enable Autoupdate option and the TeraDRE will poll for the information every 10 minutes. When you submit a rendering project the project will ask to be saved. At this time the TeraDRE rendering projects contain a history of when and what site you have submitted a job to. If you choose not to save the project after submitting, the information will not be included in the project.
6) Submitting To submit a rendering job with the TeraDRE select Run->Submit from the menu. At this point the TeraDRE will generate a submission package that will be transferred to the selected grid site with in the grid domain. If you need to terminate a submitted job click on Run->Terminate from the menu. This will terminate the job.
7) Preview At anytime during the rendering of the project you can use the previewer to fetch the frames that have been completed. To launch the previewer click Run->Preview from the menu. Frames that are not complete will show up in red. The play option of the previewer will play through the images. Preview images will be cached on your local machine as the sequence is played. The slider bar in the center of the previewer controls the speed at which playback will occur. Tip: if your playback seems a bit choppy reduce the playback speed to allow for the initial set of images to be cached.
8) Download When the rendering is complete click on Run->Download to launch the downloader. The downloader will retrieve the rendered frames from the grid site and store them in the specified output directory. The time it takes for the downloader to complete the download operation depends on the number of frames and size of the renderings. Initially all the files are selected for download, if you want to bypass download a set of files click the check box on the file. As the files are downloaded by the downloader the color changed from red to black. If the download should fail for some reason restart and use the same download directory. The downloader will check the files on the server verses the files on the local machine an only download the missing files.

• Example files

Blender example file
POVray example file
Maya example project1 Maya example project2: DNA Maya example rendering
Gelato example project

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