OS X Maya command line rendering with ssh

So, we have a lot of Apple Macs here, some very, very nice Mac Pro's. I have previously attempted to set up a render farm through X-Grid, which is managed through a Mac OS X Server.

I've just found Autodesk's Backburner is now available for mac, but I think it might not have an Administrator GUI for OS X, just Windows? I'll look into it. Anyway, found this little video on how to get a mac client working with backburner(submitting a job and using it as a render node)

But my original purpose in making this post was to catalogue how I'm going to use the command line to render (until I get backburner up and running).

So, I've installed Maya 2012 on a nice fast machine (not mine) and I want to render a job on this nice machine. So I open up terminal and type:

ssh 123.456.7.89
password....

. /Applications/Autodesk/maya2012/Maya.app/Contents/bin/MayaENV.sh

render /path/to/file.mb

The ". /Applications/Autodesk/maya2012/Maya.app/Contents/bin/MayaENV.sh" line loads up Maya Terminal.

It renders whatever you have set up in the file. i.e. I set up for it to render one frame from perspective camera at 1080p resolution on Production Quality to: /path/to/maya/project/folder/images/.

You can add more information via the 'render' command. Type:

render -h

to get a very long list of arguments for the render command.