Render on a remote machine using the Dropbox & Mail bundle

I am a little keen on 3D and sometimes render all kinds of rubbish at home. At home, I have a Macbook Pro and its dual-core Core 2 Duo for rendering is not enough, heavy scenes are considered to be long, I do not want to leave the laptop at night burning with fans. At work, there is a 4-core Mac Pro with Xeons, I thought I would throw off tasks by miscalculation, just how? And I am behind NAT'om, and he is behind NAT'om (and also on stream), I have 0 sysadminian experience, as port forwarding I did not try to configure, none of the remote desktop'ov to work did not work. Dropbox and Mail's Rules came to the rescue

At first, why did I choose the Dropbox + Mail bundle instead of continuing to fight NAT: in addition to greater stability, the dropbox files are accessible from the web interface from anywhere on the Internet, including those available for the iPhone

The idea was this - the scene from the home computer is synchronized via Dropbox with the working machine, then a letter with a certain subject and with the file name in the body starts the render, after rendering the files through the same dropbox appear on the home machine.

Faced two problems: firstly, in Help'e for Cinema 4d, in which I still render, nothing is said about working with the command line under OS X; Secondly, I do not understand anything in the apple script. In both cases, it turned out that someone had already wondered whose solution could be projected onto my tasks.
')
For the command line, I found a description of the render for Maya. The file to be accessed was inside Maya.app
I try the same for Cinema 4d.app:
right click on the file -> Show package contents -> Contents -> MacOS -> CINEMA 4D
I drag this file to the terminal and ohrenet: Blueka starts. Now the command: -nogui -render "filename"
(here it is important not to forget to set the file to be saved immediately in the render settings, otherwise it will be rendered empty)
And it worked the same way:


The next task is to actually start the render. Then I took as a basis the script with Mac OS X Hints , which added a .torrent file sent by mail to the Transmission.
All that had to be done was to change the target application to Terminal and keystroke, which is sent to the Terminal, to the line I need.
Here I, as a person who does not understand anything else in the syntax of the console, faced with the fact that the script was cursing in a slash with a space "\". Googling, it turned out that Apple Script requires another additional slash: "\\"
Well, the path I immediately replaced here on the directory Dropbox'a
It turned out like this:


Now it's up to you: set up Mail
Mail -> Preferences -> Rules
Add a new rule
I made it like this:


When a letter with renderMe comes from my mailbox, the letter is marked read, a script is launched that takes the file name from the message body, and to check if the computer and the Internet are working at all, a return letter is sent with the text that everything is ok.

Test:


The picture that appeared in the dropbox after the render and is available on all machines in the account:


judging by the description, Maya, Modo and others also support rendering via the command line. On Windows, Applescript can be replaced with a VB's extension for Outlook and, possibly, Eudora.

Interestingly, I got another square wheel or a way to live? :)