Overview

Golaem is composed of the following plugins:

• Maya plugin: scene authoring, simulation... It also loads Golaem specific shaders and render proxies
• Procedural plugins: renderer specific plugins to render Golaem simulations. 

Here is what happens on each render node when a scene is dispatched on the farm:

• Maya opens the scene, and loads the required plugins (at least the Golaem Maya plugin and the renderer plugin).
• Maya passes the whole scene geometry and shaders to the renderer
• When the renderer encounters a Golaem Proxy, it loads the Golaem Procedural Plugin
• The Golaem Procedural Plugin loads the simulation cache and generate the whole characters geometry for the renderer
• Finally the frame is rendered

Hence, to be able to render a Golaem Simulation on the Render Farm, all render nodes must be able to load the Golaem Maya Plugin and the renderer specific procedural plugin. To install those, you can use the same installer than the one used to export the simulation.

The plugins files can either be installed:

• locally (as they could be installed on an artist workstation, see above). 
• or on a network share

Depending on your installation method, the Golaem Maya Module may need to be referenced through the MAYA_MODULE_PATH environment variable in order to be correctly loaded. If using the provided .mod file, the Golaem Maya Module should automatically set the right environment variables for the renderer specific plugins to be loaded. See Configuring Render Farm Manager for a complete description.

NB: No license needs to be set for the render nodes (and it should not be set as it will steal tokens used by artist's workstations).