How to use mental ray distributed bucket rendering with backburner network rendering

Issue

You have a sequence of images that you need to render using mental ray and you have other computers you would like to use to assist with the rendering process. Each images takes a long time to render (more than 15-20 minutes). You would like to know how to use mental ray distributed bucket rendering with backburner network rendering to increase the rendering speed.

Solution

In this example, we are using a render farm comprising three machines named A, B, and C, each running a licensed copy of 3ds Max.

Warning! When using DBR in combination with backburner, it is necessary for the machine running the Backburner Server to have 3ds Max licensed. A mental ray standalone license will not enable you to use the distributed bucket rendering feature and Backburner will prompt you with a license error.

Setup:

1. Choose which machines (other than machines A, B, and C) will serve as satellites, install 3ds Max on each, and write down each machine's IP address.
2. Open Render Setup and go to the Processing tab and under the Distributed Bucket Rendering rollout, check the Distributed Render option. 
    
3. In the area below, click on Add to add additional DBR hosts.
4. In the window that appears enter the IP address of each satellite CPU to be used. DBR allows you to add up to eight physical CPUs as Satellite slaves.
    
5. Close 3ds Max.
6. Repeat steps 2-5 on machines B and C with the remaining IP addresses.
7. Launch Backburner Manager on the machine submitting the job or any other machine. Launch the Backburner Server on machines A, B, and C.
8. On the machine submitting the job, open Render Setup and choose mental ray as the renderer.
9. Go to the Distributed Bucket Rendering rollout and check the Distributed Render option.
10. Then go to Translator Options and check the options for Use Placeholder Objects and Use mental ray Map Manager.
    

The setup is now complete. You now have 3 backburner slave nodes (A, B, and C) and each of those backburner slaves nodes has up to 8 CPUs that are Satellite slaves. This give you a total of 24 slave CPUs plus the processing power of your 3 backburner slave nodes (A, B, anc C). When you submit the job to the backburner network rendering farm, the backburner manager will distribute the job to machines A, B, and C. Each machine will use its internal CPU in addition to its satellite CPUs to render the job.