Originally developed by Blur Studio, Arsenal was a replacement for 3dsmax's BackBurner. It's now a robust cross platform render management platform supporting many renderers, including 3dsmax, Maya, Houdini, 3delight, XSI, Nuke, Fusion, Shake and After Effects.

The core is written in C++ using Qt, and extensive python bindings using sip/PyQt provide the ability to customize and extend nearly every component. There are GUI tools to manage the queue, custom submitters for some packages, and a generic Python API for others.

A Google Group for discussion exists here: https://groups.google.com/group/arsenalsuite