Nekochan Net

Hi,

So, I've got my new Octane and I'm loving it, but I'm pretty keen to find a real use for it. The whole reason that I wanted one in the first place was because of Maya (I've been a Mac Maya user for years).

Now, I'm not going to fool myself that whatever spares and second hand stuff I can shove into the Octane is ever going to make it as good for rendering as most recent PCs (or Macs). But what I do wonder is, could I set it up so that I can model through Irix and remote render on the Mac? It's Maya 6.5 for IRIX, and I've got Maya versions going back to 2009 (unlimited) for Mac (Intel). But I've no idea whether this can be done, or if I'm just wasting my time trying.

Anyone tried it?

Cheers,
Ian

Oh, now that I'm trying out Maya on IRIX, anyone got any good pointers on the must have scripts / shaders etc. I did have a look on creativecrash earlier and was gratified to see that IRIX returned a reassuring number of results, but to avoid spending days going through them, any clues?

The built-in distributed rendering tool is called 'dispatcher', but I don't know if it exists for mac (or if it is compatible). My manual actually categorically states that "Dispatcher is only for IRIX" and in the next breath says that dispatcher works for Linux and IRIX... YMMV

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MAYA, nut-
Octane 2 R14k 600 V12 4GB, Octane2 R14K 600 V10 1GB ,
Onyx2 IR3 4GB Quad R14K 500 DIVO, Onyx2 IR Quad R12K 400 2GB,
SGI Indigo 2 R8K75 TEAL Extreme 256MB,
SGI Indigo 2 R10K 195 Solid Impact 256MB, MAX Impact Pending ,
Apple G5 Quad, NV Quadro 4500 + 7800GT, 12GB RAM
Sun Blade 1000 Dual 900 XVR 1000

Autodesk has had a standalone version of Mental Ray for the Mac for a while now: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&id=13566140 - What it doesn't say is how well it plays with Maya 6.5. Personally I'm quite content with the version of Mental Ray that comes built into the Irix version of Maya...

I tried out the Irix version over the weekend, and it does look pretty promising. However, I'm running it on a single 400Mhz R12K at the moment, so patience is certainly a virtue here. It's damn good for re-visiting your rendering optimisation basics, though. 8-core machines with 12 gigs of ram can make a man lazy!

As an aside, did Mental Images ever produce the MIA materials for IRIX, or did they come after the development had stopped? I vaguely remember reading that they weren't on the CD, but they were available as a download (but that could be completely wrong).

Cheers,
Ian

I don't think the mia materials were put into Maya until around version 8.5...