I don’t know why, but every time I have to set up Mental Ray between different platforms I always stumble some before everything works perfect. Today I configured my quad core Windows computer to do the chewing when rendering from my MacBook Pro laptop.
This is a super-simple setup, but somehow it wasn’t all click and go today either. First of all, I had the slave machine configured earlier, so when I tried to telnet into the port I googled about it would not connect from my Mac host.
So, I checked with the \Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\services file on the Windows machine and got the correct port number 7412 for satellite connections, then I created the maya.rayhosts file in the preferences folder on my mac containing one simple machine.
(File: /Users/chris/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/2012-x64/prefs/maya.rayhosts): 192.168.1.152:7412
After disabling the local network firewall on Windows, it sort of worked, but I got this annoying error message from Mental Ray after the render:
MSG 0.0 info : adding new host 1 (192.168.1.152:7412) MSG 0.0 error 011330: mi-ray/tcp: not a service (check /etc/services) MSG 0.0 warn 012219: using fallback inet service 7003
Then I tried to add the correct port for satellite (a different port than the one used with MR Stand alone btw) to the /etc/services.
This did not help either.
But, when I also added the “fallback service”, inet 7003/tcp to /etc/services it managed to actually shut up!
# /etc/services # Mental ray satellite mi-ray7412/tcp inet 7003/tcp
So, if anybody out there experience the same “error” message, you know what to do…
BTW, the error doesn’t stop the render from running, but I believe maybe a nanosecond or two will be wasted if the ports don’t match up and the system has to mage a different route… Who knows?
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Thanks for the great info.
I’m in the process of setting up mental ray satellite render as well (master mac – slave mac & windows). It seems to have been set up correctly.. but i really don’t see any difference in my render time.. so something must not be right.. Where do I go to see the mental ray errors so that i can troubleshoot?
like what you have here:
MSG 0.0 info : adding new host 1 (192.168.1.152:7412)
MSG 0.0 error 011330: mi-ray/tcp: not a service (check /etc/services)
MSG 0.0 warn 012219: using fallback inet service 7003
You can increase the verbosity level in Mental Ray, but to see these errors, you must run Maya from a Console prompt, like:
/Applications/Autodesk/maya2012/Maya.app/Contents/bin/maya
Then you’ll see the output from mentalray there…