This is a quick demonstration of how an artist can use Houdini’s HQueue to run jobs on a spare computer from their main workstation. It can be frustrating to get setup, and while I don't have experience doing this under Windows or Mac OS X, hopefully this will help artists get up and running under Linux. Here are the 4 points covered: 1) Setup the Server + Client on our Debian Server 2) Setup the Client on our main Workstation 3) Running a quick test to verify everything works 4)How to restart the Server and/or the Clients Notes: - Both machines already have Houdini 14.0.258 installed at /opt/hfs14.0.258 (which lets us avoid having to mess with the HQueue configuration file) - An ethernet connection is almost a requirement, especially when reading/writing heavy files (you can get an inexpensive 10/100/1000 switch on Amazon, which should be sufficient for a single artist using a few machines) - You could add more clients if you wish, just by following the same client instructions - An important note for Indie artists: in this scenario, the server has a Houdini Engine Indie license, and the workstation a regular Houdini Indie license - I recommend running the HQueue server on a different machine from the main workstation, in case the main one is a laptop, or can’t be running for long periods of time. - If you wanted to, you could totally setup an HQserver client + server on your main workstation, to manage running background sims/renders on your main computer - If you find jobs failing, check to make sure the shared drive was mounted/setup correctly (which should happen if you follow the video) I’ve found the FAQs are the easiest part of the HQueue documentation to understand: http://www.sidefx.com/docs/hqueue14.0/help/faqs The workstation in the video is running Linux Mint 17.1, and the server is running Debian Jessie. There is no audio.
