Network Render with demo?

[sarahwhg]

Is it possible to network render with the demo? I am using Max 2009. When I tried it defaulted all of my GI and gamma settings.

[Aarchitects]

This advice may be wrong as I have not tried to setup a network rendere with a demo, and am not a vizualiser but thought i would try to help.

If you are using the distributed rendering system directly in vray and the squares are comming up with your renderslaves on them but they look different compared to the ones on your computer then the the rendering itself should be working just fine, if not you will need to perform a number of tasks to set it up and install it properly before you can perform a distributed render.

I have found that distributed rendering using vray directly can be problematic with renderslaves, for best results you need to make sure that each render slave can see all your materials and if you are using photometric maps etc the renderslaves will need those too to render out the scene correctly, to do this you need to transfer all of these elements to shared network storage and check that each machine can access it properly.

You can repath the files in Max 2009 (using the UNC path only e.g. \\mymachine\mysharedmaterialsfolder) including any elements such as photometric maps but you must go back to your lights and in your scense and change the paths as it will not do it automatically with vray lights and it will generate an error in the vray log, you also need to use only vray lights with distributed rendering.

You may also want to note that if you are importing drawings or models from other applications such as CAD or Sketchup in my experience you are best off redrawing them in MAX and then deleting the originals before trying to render, or at the very least convert them into CAD drawings, perform a purge and audit in autoCAD prior to importing and then remove and blocks that have nothing in them.

Alternatively you can use backburner which will in my experience produce more consistent results, this can be used with vray, and all you need do is specify a shared path to render out too in your render settings, run the backburner server on your renderslaves and run the manager, server and monitor on your workstation, then select net render instead of distributed render and select to split the scene accross your machines using split scan lines, this should produce better results but you won't see the entire scene until each machine has finished rendering it out and the secondary job has stiched al the images together.

I hope this helps.