Autodesk’s decision to ship Backburner 2008 with Maya2010 has leveraged  the utilisation of resources across the network for executing batch rendering task from a single node point. Backburner jobs can be easily created from within Maya 2010 using the Create Backburner Job command under the Render menuset as shown in the  figure below.

This will bring up a window similar to the one shown below.

Here you can specify the job name, frame range, number of tasks, Renderer and also specify the IP address of the machine in which the backburner Manager is running.

But the real power of backburner is revealed when you get under the hood and explore the power of the command line based utiliy cmdjob.exe. This is a handy tool for adding jobs to backburner manager for  literally any version of maya and not even just maya even Softimage, Aftereffects, and Nuke projects with a change in the passed arguments.The cmdjob utility can be accessed from within the backburner installation directory.

The basic syntax for the cmdjob is as follows CMDJOB <Options> executable to run <executable parameters>

By specifying the executable for the specific version of maya and passing the arguments for the maya batch we can trigger renders across multiple machines in the network and still monitor the progress using the backburner monitor.For example:

cmdjob.exe -jobName myRenderJob -jobNameAdjust -manager localhost -priority 50 -numTasks noOfTasks -taskName 1 -leaveInQueue “C:Program Files (x86)AutodeskMaya2009binRender.exe” -r mr -s 0 -e 196 -of tiff -proj projectPath -rd renderDirectory fileName.ma

will add a job named myRenderJob to manager running in the same machine(localhost) using Maya2009 batch using renderer mentalray(mr) for frame range o to 196 with file format of tiff to renderDirectory location for file named fileName.ma.It will distribute the job to noOfTasks number of machines in which backburner server is running.

You can get a list of all the valid parameters accepted by cmbjob from the list below