Distributed rendering and the mental ray service
Both Satellite and Standalone distributed rendering rely on the mental ray service to be configured correctly. In XSI version 5.1 the mental ray service was renamed based on the version of mental ray, instead of the version of XSI. This change was not updated in the released documentation.
The mental ray service on Windows
The distributed rendering service listens on the TCP port and runs an associated batch file.
Satellite distributed rendering uses the raysat3_4_6_14server service, which runs the raysat3_4_6_14.bat batch file on each computer.
Standalone distributed rendering uses the ray3_4_6_14server service, which runs the ray3_4_6_14.bat batch file on each computer.
These batch files set the environment variables required for distributed rendering through setenv.bat and then run the mental ray renderer (ray3.exe or raysat.exe).
The mental ray service on Linux
The xinetd.conf file reads the raysat3_4_6_14 and/or the ray3_4_6_14 service configuration file from the /etc/xinetd.d directory. The services are configured to call the ray3.sh script file, which sets the environment variables required for distributed rendering and then runs the mental ray renderer (ray3 or raysat).
