In this post I’d like to provide you with some useful links that might help you with your daily rendering work.
http://mayastation.typepad.com/maya-station/2009/09/rendering-for-print.html
This shows you what you have to consider when splitting an image into multiple regions either when you are trying to render print resolution or if you just want to get it done faster by rendering each tile on a different machine.
The actual splitting can automatically be done by RenderPal. You just have to bake effects like final gather or global illumination before.
http://mayastation.typepad.com/maya-station/2009/06/how-to-read-mental-ray-output-messages.html
This might help you when you are rendering with mental ray and try to analyse the output of a chunk during rendering to check what might have caused an error or if you just want to know what is going on.
http://www.lamrug.org/resources.html
A great collection of articles on how to optimize mental ray memory wise or to increase performance.
And most importantly here are some guides on how to build your own render farm:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/render-farm-node,2340.html the most extensive one
http://mos.futurenet.com/resources/3dworld/TDW94.s_farm.pdf
http://helmer.sfe.se/
