Best Remote Desktop for 3DSmax / Vray combination + laptop

[Vizioen]

Hey,

As I will start working a lot more abroad and I'd like to be as flexibel as possible with my current desktop + NAS setup. I was thinking to buy myself a laptop and get a good remote desktop software so I can work remotely without any hassle.

I have a 3 monitor setup 2 x 2K in landscape and 1 x 4K in portrait. So I will also buy 3 monitors and put them at my office abroad.

Reason why I don't want to invest in a new workstation is I'm waiting for new threadrippers but I don't see them coming anytime soon, so I want to wait a little bit. But in the meantime I can remote desktop to my workstation at my home office.

But I was wondering which software is the best for remote desktop work in 3dsmax / Vray, with the best multi monitor support. Is this still teamviewer or are there better ones out there? Price/ feature wise.

I was also wondering, because I wanted to invest in a macbook pro or air with an M1 processor. Is this a good choice? (I've read that I need a special dock for multiple monitors as M1 doesn't support more than 1, but it's doable although expensive) I haven't been an apple fan but I wanted to start producing music and ableton just runs best on these as I've experienced. And I've always been happy with my 7 years old macbook air (untill I left it in my car in the scorching sun and the keyboard melted).

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Hey Ashely,

There are Anydesk, Zoho Assist and Chrome Remote Assist, they are all great and will get the job done(but I haven't tried with 3 HIGH DPI montiors, this is not gonna easy). You should give this a try before making a decision

but I don't see them coming anytime soon, so I want to wait a little bit

I would personally get a laptop, then maybe you can use remote access for submitting the scene for final rendering on your main machine. Laptops are not very expensive now and yet very capable. Around 1600 Euros will get you something descent with Thunderbolt support
You can hook it up to a portable type-C monitor for mobility. So one laptop + one external monitor should get the job done, it is what I used during my traveling in the past (better than having to deal with Remote access)

I wanted to invest in a macbook pro or air with an M1 processor. Is this a good choice?

M1 is the future in Apple's line-up, all their Macs will eventually run Apple silicon. They offer great performance and great value, I will get mine soon and retire my old 2018 Macbook Air
This advice is more about the machine in general, not for your specific use case. Using a 15 inch display to remote access a 2k/4k monitor is gonna be trouble. If you have a laptop now at hand I suggest investing time into a workflow before buying.

I hope this is helpful in some way.

Best,
Muhammed

[Vizioen]

Thx Muhammed for your reply. A laptop for my work doesn't exist yet, I'm afraid and I'm not willing to compromise to power. I have a threadripper and 128 GB RAM right now (I use almost all of it because of huge projects) and a NAS with 5TB worth of assets, I'm also quite used to the speed of the threadripper (3970x).

Reason I would like an M1 macbook pro is because my air is quite useless (for music production) and 7 years old (2014), but still holds up very nicely for every day tasks. So Apple laptops are very good bang for their buck. I would have to have a displaylink docking station so I can attaced 3 monitors (natively only supports one monitor) when I'm abroad and just take my laptop back when I'm on the road. I'm not planning on doing rendering when I'm on the road though. I have very good internet where my workstation is and where I would work abroad as well, so connection to my workstation should be good with a small latency (or do you think the latency will be too big?).

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Yeah, it is mostly about the latency on 3 high resolution monitors. Will need +200 mbps connection to have no drops. Best is to dedicate some time for testing this
M1 is great, go for it

[dean_dmoo]

How long are you gonna be abroad for?

I really dislike the remote setup for actual max work and the potential issues with internet connections being down. Even being in NL with good networks and a professional IT company managing everything the amount of times the vpn was down, or something with the KPN network, or even windows updates f$%king stuff up that I saw with my colleagues the past year was far too often for me to be comfortable relying on it. Even just not being able to tell if the pc is still calculating stuff and clicking something too soon can crash max, just constantly waiting for that crap is already a lot of time.

Thats why I would calculate the amount of projected workhours you plan to work remotely, multiply it by your hourly rate and then see what 20% of the total is. Because I would expect the 20% to be what you lose in (daily) productivity. If that is close to mirroring your current setup incl a nas, with maybe a slightly less powerfull pc because its probably mostly test renders then that would be worth considering imo.

The most critical part is setting up an automatic mirroring of the nas servers with a cloud setup, something I still need to do tbh as I now manually copy stuff over by remote or wetransfer. If you are on your own its ok, but if more people are working on projects you can quickly lose track of stuff.

[Vizioen]

It's going to be 50-50 abroad more or less. I'm thinking of investing in a new machine. The remote setup doesn't sound as appealing anymore, I'm seeing to many obstacles. I did some remote work in the past with Chrome desktop even, on a big TV, but it kind of sucked.

Now I'm looking into a cloud based storage, but I need a lot of space (around 10 TB) to be safe, I might want to clean up a little and save 1TB or 2. But I can't be bottlenecked by my internet connection either. Investing in an extra NAS is not something I want to do. So maybe another option is to invest in a few M2 SSDs and put them in Raid 5, in both my workstations (that would also give me a bigger speed advantage over my current NAS, I think?). And only sync a few offline folders (for work) to them and my entire library. And use my current NAS as a complete offline backup. Or could I use my QNAP NAS as the cloud mirroring device, that syncs to my 2 workstations?

Another thing I would need is a VPN between the two computers as I want to use the one unused workstation for rendering and I want to use Pulze Render Manager for instance. I have no clue how to do this yet though.

Any advice on this would be great.

[dean_dmoo]

If you are limited to just your own work (no colleagues), setting up large m2 or even ssd drives in both workstations sounds really nice. We have an ssd nas but the difference between opening stuff directly from my m2 drive vs the nas is so big. And that's even with the maps still on the nas. If those would be on a local drive it would be even better.

The online sync is probably the biggest issue, but once you have a copy on both sides the actual new data being sent back and forth per day is reasonably low (a couple of gigs sent back and forth isn't much). It's more setting it up. If you aren't going to add an extra NAS and just keep them on local drives dropbox or similar might be the easiest. Then use the NAS as a general back up for those folders. But hopefully someone else can chime in on this, I haven't got it set up like that.

You will need to add an extra rendernode license if you plan on working on both at the same time, if you don't have an extra one lying around now. Well worth it imo.

Not sure about the pulze render manager part though and how that can be linked to two pc's. A VPN sounds right with a "work network" that both pc's are connected to as if you have both in one office. Because my home pc isn't linked to work I just copy the files over and turn on the renders manually at home (queued locally in backburner).

[bildform]

Another Idea would be to get a small case ( https://www.sliger.com/products/cases/cerberus_x/ ) and carry it around. But the risk of loosing it would be to big for myself.

Realistically I would get two machines with a 2 TB system nvme and one 8TB nvme for assets. I stopped using a NAS for a year now, and working with local files is so much faster.


To keep your files synced you have few options:

Syncthing is free software that keeps your files synched over the internet. The synching is encrypted. Most of the data would be copied locally anyway. You can copy your assets on your first machine and only changes would have to be synched.

You could use dropbox: The whole 8TB nvme ssd is you dropbox folder. For this to work you would have to get Dropbox Teams Advanced (unlimited space for files). This will cost you 45,00 € a month because you need at least 3 user. On the plus side you would have another backup.


Your files would always be the same on both computers. If you want to render on the remote one, you can only copy the max file and start a render job locally. Any remote desktop software will be up to the task. Just do not forget to put it in autostart and have a way to remote start your PC-