Muster is Virtual Vertex suite of applications to monitor and control a pool of hosts dedicated to distributed processing. Focused on the film/video segment, Muster takes care of the entire rendering pipeline, from the artists workstation to the rendering hosts, the so called Renderfarm.

With 6 years of development behind, Muster has grown in size and functionalities meeting the end user requirements with easy of use and proven stability and a full set of features, most of them got from direct users feedbacks, that gives an enterprise level set of tools and services tuned for state of the art pipelines.

Dynamic
Muster is a dynamic service. It take cares of managing the remote hosts, control them and check for faults. Any addition to the hosts pool can be done without any interruption in the rendering pipeline. You can add an host, propagate configurations, remove it or reconfigure on the fly. Any change is detected by Muster that make sures your renderings will still continue in any circumstance. You are even able to install Muster remotely using our Management Console tool with no need of an interactive login on the host.
Multiplatform

The code base of Muster command line tools and services is fully cross platform compatible. You can expect the same behaviour across Windows, Linux and MAC OS X and choose to deploy your render engines on the best operating system for your environment giving you high flexibility.

Mixed environments are fully supported using our internal substitution path engine, allowing the exchange of path's prefixes between hosts as well as customizing different local paths on the user side. Users may work remotely, upload the files on the farm and send jobs using their local path by using a dedicated user account.

Multiengine

The new template engine in Muster 5 introduced a powerfull abstraction layer between the Muster logic and the end user render engines (or distributed processes). Using a macro language, end users can configure the hosts behaviours for every kind of custom process, customize the appearance and the attributes of the submission panel and even customize the existing templates.

Muster comes with a set of templates that supports jobs for Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3D Studio Max, Newtek Lightwave, Softimage|XSI, Cinema 4D, Alias Studio, Combustion, Digital Fusion and Adobe After Effects as well as custom render engines like Turtle, Renderman and Mental ray in both embedded plug-in versions and/or stand alone versions.

Single image slicing

With render engines that are able to render custom regions of still frames, Muster is able to dispatch single frame images across multiple hosts by dividing them in several slices, render them on the free hosts, and then assemble them back in the final images.

Apart from previewing final size renderings, you can forget long waits for print sized images by distributing them across several hosts at high resulutions like 4096x4096.

We suggest you to read the features list of Muster 5 for further information as well as browse some screenshots belonging to Muster explorer, the Muster visual interface.