txmake on local

Preflight commands can now be run remotely, based on compute location in RenderMan Globals.

In previous releases, even when selecting distributed rendering, preflight operations and resultant texture and shadow creation always took place on the local processor. In RAT 5.5.1, if the compute location is set to "remote", the standalone mtor preflight job will be run remotely. The resultant commands from the preflight expand (generally txmake commands) will run either locally or remotely depending upon an entry in the mtor.ini file.

In order for expanded commands within the preflight to run remotely you must define a service key entry for

"TxMakeSvc"

in the mtor.ini file. This is not set by default.

Leaving the TxMakeSvc defined as {} in the mtor.ini file (default configuration) will cause the txmake commands to be run on the local processor.

A suitable choice may be pixarRender (although a render slot will be consumed during txmake in this case) or simply define a custom service key and allocate appropriate servers in the alfred.schedule file.