With anima®, you can use your shared network in the same way you use it with other DCC applications as 3dsMax®, Maya®, Cinema4D®, etc.
For example, if you place the anima® project folder in some location that can be accessed from all the devices that will be working on the project or participating on the renders, then all of them will be able to load the resources needed for the render, which are all included inside that project folder.
However, you need to make sure that your devices have access to the path where the anima® scene is located, just the same as you do when you render any your projects using 3dsMax®, Maya®, or Cinema4D®, either in with interactive renders, or using some Render Manager like Backburner, Deadline, Pulze or Team Render.
Also, the downloaded resources can be stored in a shared "Purchases" folder and then reused by multiple devices avoiding the need to download the same models multiple times from each machine.
To configure anima to use a centralized "Purchases" folder on a network path, please follow these steps:
- Go to the main menu (the anima® icon on the top left) and select "Preferences".
- Change the "Purchases" path to set a shared folder on your network.
- Automatically, all the content present in the folder will be moved to a new location.
When you change your "Purchases" folder to another location and the current one already has some models, the following dialog will appear:
As you can read there, if you click the "OK" button, all the assets you have in your current "Purchases" folder will be moved to the new location. However, if you click "Change path" the new path will be set and saved in your preferences, but no assets will be moved nor overwritten. This way you can freely choose to let anima® handle the transference of the assets or manage it yourself.
Please notice that the Render Nodes do not need to have access to the "Purchases" folder because all the resources used in a project are automatically stored inside the "resource_cache" subfolder from each anima project folder.
You can read more details about this at the following documentation: