I work at a small post production facility in Hollywood. We have a render farm of 6 dual Xeon Win2000 Boxx rack machines as well as five dual Xeon Win2000 Boxx workstations that render in their spare time. We run Maya and After Effects and we use Smedge to handle the distributed rendering for both maya and AE and Mental Ray. We also have another Dual Xeon box running Server 2003 with a eight drive raid setup with two main partitions, one is raid 1 for the maya scenes and the AE projects and the other is raid 0 for the rendered frames and comps. We started with just two rack machines, but we add one or two every couple months when the budget permits. Our renders are sent to Smedge via a script that we run from an Interix csh. It greatly simplifies the process of sending out renders. Each project we work on has a script with the name of the project, or the shot, and when we're ready to render we run the script which parses the text file with all the parameters for the render such as frame range, render quality and so on. Some people don't care for Smedge to much, but it gets the job done, and works for most all 3d applications as well as most compositing apps.
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I work at a small post production facility in Hollywood. We have a render farm of 6 dual Xeon Win2000 Boxx rack machines as well as five dual Xeon Win2000 Boxx workstations that render in their spare time. We run Maya and After Effects and we use Smedge to handle the distributed rendering for both maya and AE and Mental Ray. We also have another Dual Xeon box running Server 2003 with a eight drive raid setup with two main partitions, one is raid 1 for the maya scenes and the AE projects and the other is raid 0 for the rendered frames and comps. We started with just two rack machines, but we add one or two every couple months when the budget permits. Our renders are sent to Smedge via a script that we run from an Interix csh. It greatly simplifies the process of sending out renders. Each project we work on has a script with the name of the project, or the shot, and when we're ready to render we run the script which parses the text file with all the parameters for the render such as frame range, render quality and so on. Some people don't care for Smedge to much, but it gets the job done, and works for most all 3d applications as well as most compositing apps.