Max 2018 + Remote Desktop

[VelvetElvis]

At work we are being gently pushed into using Remote Desktop to work in Max if we are away from the office (working at home or on the road). What is everyone's experience with using Max and Remote Desktop? Mine has always been a very painful experience and Max was never meant to be used in such a way. Is this consistent across the board or is there a way to make the experience better? I'm looking for broad experiences so I can get back to the IT team and try to figure out best use cases.

At a previous place of work, we were able to just fire up a net extender that accessed the office's licenses and use Max on our home machine or company laptop so everything was local and it was no different that being in the office outside of a bit of lag accessing the license for the first time.

[Donald2B]

I use this quite extensively. It will never be as good as working locally on your computer, but I haven't had any issues. Windows 10 x64, 3DS Max 2014-2018, etc.

I have multiple Max UI workspace configurations for the number of monitors I'm using remotely. For example I have 3 monitors at the office and 3 monitors at home with the same resolution. So I can remote into the office and use all three monitors as I was sitting at my desk. When I'm mobile using my Surface Pro for connecting, I use the single monitor workspace so all my dialogues don't end up off-screen.

Depending on the internet connection can make the experience vary. We do have a hardware VPN setup to securely log into the network and then work.

I couldn't work without it, as I can monitor everything remotely, and it something happens to the render farm or a render crashes, I can easily remote it and fix it without having to drive back to the office. So I'm enjoying the freedom this allows without having to transfer GBs of data locally and then upload back to the office to get set back up for the renderfarm.

That's my 10 cents.

[robdeja]

I know a few bigger VFX companies are using thin/zero clients for remote working/remote freelancers. PCOIP seems like quite a good solution for centralising hardware for both internal and external use.
With their solutions, all the hardware is located in a server room, usually rack mounted and virtualised with rendering/GPU capacity being balanced and distributed as needed. This also allows teams to hot-desk and move around per project as needed and it also gives everyone access to the same hardware. I imagine that it also saves the IT admins a lot of trouble since they only need to manage a few (mega)servers rather than lots of individual, varied hardware workstations across physically different locations.

The guys I know working with these are all using Teradici ( https://www.teradici.com/products/de...s/zero-clients ) and say that on an internal network it?s as fast as native (actually, faster as the network is not being used to transfer lots of scene assets), remotely they get near native speeds 50fps/low latency (depending on internet connection of course).


This setup is probably a bit inaccessible to you and I but the methodology is applicable on a much smaller scale. The Teradici cards can be fitted to a workstation and a compatible zero client can be used remotely to communicate with this to effectively give you a hardware accelerated Remote Desktop. If you?re going to be doing quite a lot of remote working, this may be something to consider.