How to set up screamer painlessly!

• You obviously have a network setup -(or you wouldn't need screamernet!) so we're going to assume a server PC and 4 other networked workstations for this example.
• Note that all objects, textures and save file paths MUST be ~network friendly~
• I.E.: having frames saving to 'C:\' is going to be a disaster as all machines have their own C:\ drives.
• Better is to create two shared folders on your main machine and map them to drive letters on ALL machines.
  P:\ - contains LightWave content
  R:\ - contains rendered frame

so on your main server machine create two folders

now map these folders as network drives:

You are looking for this in the My Computer tree in explorer for all your PC's

and it will look like this in My Computer from the start menu:

Now with that over with we need to setup up all the common LightWave content so that all the PC's know where everything is. - we do this by carrying out some subversive editing to the LightWave App :-)

First open LightWave and Modeller and save the menu and keyboard configs you have created to a suitable place

do that like this:

LAYOUT

once you have the menu layout panel open save the config to a suitable location

repeat the process for the keyboard shortcuts

do the exact same thing for

MODELLER

with your four configs saved we proceed to the next step.

Close all your LightWave app's - including the hub.

Now go to your LightWave folder on whichever drive it is installed and MOVE ALL of the following folders to the new folder you created called MY LightWave CONTENT:

while you're at it move ALL folders that you have created in the content directory that are specific to yourself to the very same folder.

As you may have surmised by now The screamernet nodes will all be accessing this shared network drive for all the content they require - but there is one more thing they will all need and that is access to all the plug ins that they will need to carry out the rendering process - that's the next step.

Go to your root LightWave directory and MOVE the entire plug ins folder to the same mapped network drive folder.

Then make another folder in your mapped P drive folder called Screamernet - in that folder make one called config_files. Into this folder move all of your LW *.cfg files from their original directory to this Configs folder. You will find them in C:\Documents and Settings\USER.

You should have something like this:

Now for the next step - we have to add a few things to the shortcuts that we use to start our Newtek app's.

Go to the shortcuts you use and right- click properties for each one to get this screen:

you can see there's already an extra bit of text on the end of the target path - add this to each of the two shortcuts for Modeller and Layout:

*space*-cp:\Screamernet\config_files

this tells the shortcut for the app's that it's config files are in the folder we specify in a new path in the P drive - so that it can find them when we launch them.

Now for a bit of text editing of the config files. If you haven't done so already associate a text editor with *.cfg files and then open the cfg files for LightWave which are now in their new directory. Carry out a search and replace to change all drive letter references to their new drive

for example change C: to P: wherever it is found and then save them all and shut them down again

Now is a good time to point out that sometimes you may launch your app's in the future and find that the layout has defaulted to the standard format as it was when freshly installed - this is because the app's weren't able to find the new path specified and reverted to default.

This is almost always because after a fresh reboot the networked drives have not been accessed properly! Always access your drives prior to launching any of the LightWave app's and now that the PC has "connected" to them you will launch with all your saved configs intact!

Launch both app's - if all has gone well you should notice no changes - but if for some reason something has gone wrong somewhere this is why we backed up or layout and modeller settings - do the reverse of the earlier operations and reload you modeller and layout menu and keyboard configs.

Then in the options panel set the new content directory to P:\

and to be doubly sure everything is nice and intact access the following:

and tell the panel to scan the plug-in directory in it's new location.

When done shut down both app's and the hub to save all the new data. Re-Launch them both again to check everything stayed as it should have - if successful - we can now move onto the next step - which is top setup the screamer nodes themselves.

On each of the network workstations and the main server PC open up Notepad or another suitable editor.

Type the following into Server PC's document

lwsn -2 -c[path to config files folder] -d[path to content directory]\ [path to job file] \[path to ack file]

so that would come out as:

lwsn -2 -cP:\Screamernet\config_files -dP:\ P:\Screamernet\job1 P:\Screamernet\ack1

then add the following text before that line

C:
cd C:\LightWave\Programs
lwsn -2 -cP:\screamernet\config_files DP:\ P:\screamernet\job1 P:\screamernet\ack1

• the first line defines the drive
• the second defines the location of the program folder
• the final line defines the commands for screamer.
• Save that file as a text file called Screamer.txt in the Programs folder in the root LightWave directory where you have it installed.
• Rename the file to Screamer.bat
• assign a text editor to that file type in the windows options.

PC2:

• C:
• cd C:\LWScreamer\Programs
• lwsn -2 -cp:\Screamernet\config_files -dp:\ P:\Screamernet\job2 P:\Screamernet\ack2

• each node will happily load the scene file - render it's allocated frame and save it to wherever specified in the R drive by the scene file
• you can at any point abort by hitting ESC
• when finished hit the screamer shutdown which will close all the nodes running on each of the machines!

Well there that's it! Hope this helps you out! All the best

Fabs'