studio setup for rendering

[stezza]

Hi folks.

I just want to ask how other studios have their rendering set up.

We work directly from the server and not locally and I believe that this causes a hit in file transfer, reading large texture files or reading/writing light maps for rendering.

Our IT guy says it is just fine but this cant be as good as working locally, can it?

Do people use SVN with their Maya projects and do you use mapped drives?

Be good to hear how others have it.

Cheers
S

[Morbid Angel]

Well any network has its limit. So depends on how many people are using it at the same time and what network speed you have. I have never been at a facility where the network speed was as fast as if everything was locally.

But you can get close to it, you have to be smart about some things. For example large texture maps can be mipmapped (tiled) so you don't load the actual map, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap

using reference to reduce size of your scenes, thus save/load times thus network pressure. things like that will take the load off the network. But in my experience some of the main network hoggers are the farm machines, which tend to read a lot of data and write it.

Not much can be done there except increase network speed, storage capacity (more drives faster data processing).

The thing is any time you try to work with the network this means your local machine has to communicate with a another machine, it will never be as fast as communicating inside one machine (cpu to mobo to hdd to mobo to cpu)

[stezza]

Hi MA.
I totally agree with you.
We have had server overload and this really slows us down. I am thinking along the lines of having a nice 2T drives connected locally to each machine and some kind of SVN to locally save the current project from server, then it's just a matter of checking in and updating with SVN as you go.

Now...which SVN?

[beenyweenies]

All of my working files are on a local 512GB SSD drive that is synced with Box.com. This way I have extremely fast file performance that is always backed up in the cloud. Projects that get closed out are archived to a RAID5 box. Nothing fancy here. We have good in house servers connected via gigabit, but performance isn't that of a local SSD. Also, servers go down occasionally.

As for rendering, we do all of our animation renders on Rebus Farm. It's fantastic.