Backburner render manager and Blender

I started wondering, how to get Blender renders to Autodesk Backburner render manager and it turned out to be quite easy. Backburner is the free render manager-server-monitor system that comes with 3DS Max, Maya and other Autodesk projects and can also accept any other command line executable input. Autodesk products can submit jobs directly from the program, other software need a plugin or one can submit jobs through command line tool called cmdjob.exe.

So how to do it with Blender

Basically it is very easy. Submit command looks something like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Autodesk\Backburner\cmdjob.exe" -jobName "submitBlenderJob" -manager localhost -priority 50 -numTasks 1 "C:\Program Files\Blender\blender-2.66a-windows64\blender.exe" -b "C:\projekt\stseen.blend" -a

It breaks down into four parts:

cmdjob.exe <cmdjob parameters> <program executable> <program parameters>

Program parameters are the usual command line rendering arguments that can be found in Blender wiki or for other programs (AfterEffects for example) in their help documents.

cmdjob argumens can be found here:
http://download.autodesk.com/us/systemdocs/pdf/backburner2011_user_guide.pdf

some info about tasklists and dividing up jobs:
http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/16/ENU/3ds-Max-Help/index.html?url=files/GUID-F23992DB-19BD-423A-A97C-5CC157328E63.htm,topicNumber=d30e554791

Blender command line arguments:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Doc/Command_Line_Arguments

Backburner 2012 installer:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=17888178&linkID=9241178

At the moment I use Backburner for scheduling AfterEffects and Blender jobs and it seems to work fine. You can also add e-mail notifications about success and errors which can be very handy.