Muster overview

Render farm software and distributed computing for Windows , Mac OS X and Linux

  • Giving the possibility to implement our own python code inside the template definition was very useful and our whole rendering pipeline rely on muster. Most of the production automation were handled directly by the dispatcher, that's a significant saving in time. The support was all the time very reactive and we were able to achieve our most creative idea.
    Jean-François MabillenWave Digital
  • Muster works very well in our company and is a really good and professional product at a very high level. We render hundreds of frames every day, 24 hours a day. We are increasingly configuring Muster for our in-house needs and integrating it with our pipeline with Ftrack, Pype and many other custom tools. Really, Muster has become "rock solid" software all the years. I am very happy about that!

    Olaf Przybyszewski, VFX Supervisor3de
  • Muster have always been at the core of our rendering systems, from the start with only a few instance’s back in 2006 to the big scalable enterprise of hundreds of instances that we have today. The possibility to empower your pipeline with the python templates and shape it over time for various production needs have been critical for us. Muster has always delivered. It´s a true proven workhorse that keeps on getting better for every year. We are looking forward to the future and another decade of rendering.

    Thomas Skareteg, CinematicsMassive | a Ubisoft studio
  • “With the plethora of new possibilities of Muster thanks to the integrated Python engine, we are really pushing our pipeline to its limits….”
    Stefan GalleithnerSeven Bits customer since 2004
  • "I use Muster since version 4, switching from Maya software to Mentalray, from Renderman to Arnold and now RedShift, I delivered tv series, commercials, visual fx and high resolution illustrations. Muster never missed a bit, it's really an all purpose render tractor"
    Raimondo Della CalceartFive animation studio

Crafted with attention to details, easy to use, and deeply customizable with APIs,
Muster is a next-level Renderfarm management system.

Muster 9 is our software to provide a clean and powerfull system to manage CGI Renderfarms and distributed computing.
It has a wide range of incredible features, a clean interface and an huge amount of customizations facilities. Easy for Wranglers, powerfull for pipeline’s developers.

 

Mobile Ready.

 

Muster includes an integrated web server engine that’s the core of our HTTP/Rest APIs but also exposes a minimal, clean, and intuitive web based interface to its core features.

Based on the Bootstrap framework, Muster is mobile ready right from the start. Its responsive, mobile fluid system let you take control of the Dispatcher service using your Phone, your Tablet or your web browser.

The integrated web server code is distributed as open source and it’s based only on jQuery/javascript/Boostrap with non minimized components. It may be the starting point for a custom web based interface or a great example to learn the HTTP/Rest APIs.

 

muster mobile

 

Powerful yet simple.

Built for all levels of expertise, Muster gives you a clean customisable view of your hardware, your jobs and the system logs

 

THE HOSTS VIEW

Take total control of your farm hosts with a clean report that lets you manage any aspect of your devices. You can even take remote control over them or shutdown and wakeup hosts, manually or automatically!

THE JOBS VIEW

A foldable hierarchical tree view of your queue jobs. You can drag and drop jobs to nest them into folders, chains dependancies, and get a visual resume of what’s going on your farm!

THE LOGS VIEW

Any serious system needs a log. Muster implements 2 different logs facilities. While we still creates text based verbose logs you can still query from within the interface, the logs view gives you a clean and compact log that updates in realtime and shows just what you need for the regular system usage. Any activity related to your hosts and your jobs is here!

 

 

Everything you need.

 

Integrated accelerated sequence viewer

We made our best to keep you inside the Muster interface. That’s why the latest version ships with an integrated free, OpenGL accelerated image sequences viewer. It supports HDR natively accepting openEXR images as well as standard image formats like PNG, TIFF, Maya IFF, BMP, TGA, JPEG, RLA and SGI. Not enough ? The image viewer is tightly integrated with your Muster jobs. Are you browsing a bad frame ? With just one click, you can send back your frame or a job’s chunk directly into the Muster queue to get rendered again!

TOTAL CONTROL OVER YOUR ERRORS AND WARNINGS

In 17 years, we realised that the most important aspect of a Render farm manager system is its error reporting tool. That’s why we have rewritten it from scratch and made a totally integrated system that keep tracks of any error or warning you get during your renders. Always! Any time you get back to our old jobs, you have a precise list of your errors and warnings, their lines numbers, and the original log file. You can also override globally or on a job basis, what you consider an error or a warning, using clear texts finds or regular expressions! You gain precise control over your jobs and stay sure that if you get an error, this is something really important to check!

NOTIFICATIONS

You deserve to stay away from your systems and be sure everything is running smoothly. That’s why we have rewritten our notifications system to let you select exactly what notifications you really need. Also you can deliver notifications on a user or group basis, the system is completely integrated in our users management feature and let you take total control over them. Emails, Muster notificators, and soon, mobiles devices. Everything is under control and totally customizable!

 

 

We missed something ? CUSTOMIZE! Everything is Python here!

 

EXTERNAL ENGINES!

To support external engines, we use Python 3.3. Our templates system let you build beautiful integrated GUI components and bind Muster with whatever engine you like. You’re not tied to image rendering, you can bind EVERYTHING, running it as a job for a single node, or as a broadcast job. The template system let you script basically any aspect of a job submission, you can also modify the existing templates to put your own behaviours and checks inside the existing implementations.

SCRIPT ANY COMPONENT! INSIDE MUSTER!

Muster is made by several key components, the Dispatcher service that orchestrates everything, the Renderclient service, that needs to be installed on each node you want to be controlled from Muster, and our GUI, the Muster Console. Using the builtin Python capabilities, you can script any of those components changing basically any behaviour of Muster depending on your needs! Are you worried about testing, copying and delivering scripts across your entire farm ? Do not worry, we provide an integrated Python code editor that let you push your changes automatically across the entire nodes cluster. Also, when writing scripts for Muster Console, you have access to QT the world’s best multiplatform GUIs tool. By using Pyside and Python, you can write your own GUI interfaces integrated inside Console!

SCRIPTING EXTERNALLY

Do you need to integrate an external system ? No worries, you have a plethora of options by diving into the Muster APIs and command line facilities. First, you can use mrtool , our command line based control tool for Muster. It has tons of options and let you do basically anything from querying to control Muster itself simply from a command line. Not happy ? Well, we provide bindings for the Muster APIs, and they are available for C++, Python 2.7, Python 3.3, Java and .NET. Also we provide the interface files for SWIG, the tool we use to build the bindings, that means you can own compile bindings for basically any available language on the earth. Do you think C++ is hard ? Well, mrtool is completely open source.

 

Integrated image viewer


Integrated image viewer with OpenEXR support tightly integrated with our frames check technology

 

Frames slicing


Frames slicing technology let you render a single image on multiple machines by splitting them in slices and automatically assemble them back at the end of the process * (available on render engines able to produce tiled rendering)

 

Python based


External renders integration based on Python 3.3 as well as internal scripting and external API bindings available in multiple languages. Total integration with your custom pipeline needs!

100% cross platform


Totally cross platform using our paths translation technology that let you render the same scene across different operative systems and different mount points

 

Innovative error handling


Innovative error checking that let you override default behaviors by using a visual error reporting tool with a detailed resume of the errors and warnings for each render process

 

Multi version support


Multi version software support let you install multiple versions of your favorite render engine and use it seamless inside Muster by simply changing a dropdown

Directory services integration


Integrated LDAP and Active Directory support to seamless integrate into your corporate databases

 

Multiple databases


Runs with an embedded database, using Mysql or SQL Server depending on your needs

 

Integrated web server


Gorgeous integrated web server that let you access your data from a web browser as well as from your mobile devices

Are you ready to try Muster ?

The free evaluation version comes with up to 4 nodes unlocked, if you are a small studio you can use Muster with 4 external rendering hosts for free, forever!

TRY BUY RELEASE NOTES

Do you still have questions? Fell free to contact us for further information!