render slaves

[urbanbeing]

i have set up 2 render slaves to my computer , how do i know if its working , will my rendering time increase substantially , or should i check the firewall settings on the slaves?

[Micha_cg]

Re: render slaves

You will see at the spawner consoles, that the scene is loaded and rendered. Also, if you press "resolve" at the Rhino DR dialog, than you get the IP adresses of the working spawners. If you have problems, best try to shut down the firewalls and try it without, than ...

[urbanbeing]

Re: render slaves

Starting DR
Could not connect to host 10.0.0.101:
Using 0 hosts for distributed rendering.

i took down the fire wall on the slave pc, some im not sure now , does it render much faster or just a bit faster?

[Micha_cg]

Re: render slaves

It depends of the inital render time. For an image with 1 minute render time you will not see a big speedup, because the communication need time and the light cache calculation used the master only.

But if you used DR for an image with 20 min render time, than you get per all togetherfour machines 5 min. ;D

You started the drspawner.exe at the slave engine? The IP adress is right?

[urbanbeing]

Re: render slaves

yeah i loaded the drspawner on the slaves , just like in the manual ... my rendertime is about 30 mins , i need it to be faster
how do i unblock just that app if it were firewalled?

it says now : Starting DR
Could not connect to host 10.0.0.101: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.

[Arquimenez]

Re: render slaves

hi there, i have the same trouble, and the same message appears on the dialoghe box, couldnt connect, need some help!!!

[Micha_cg]

Re: render slaves

I can't help here - seems to be a network problem, independent from VfR.

[dkendig]

Re: render slaves

Unfortunately there are a lot of variables to consider when dealing with a network setup. If you have no idea how to administer a network, you might run in to a bit of trouble, especially if you have a very complicated security software suite, or if you're running Windows Vista, because of all the extra security stuff they have in there. Due to the many configurations and complications you can come across, we recommend that you refer to either the person in charge of your computers/network, the manufacturer of whatever security software you have, or whoever made the operating system you are using. Really, if you just go to Google, and search for the problem, you should be able to find an answer.

If you are unable to even open or run the DRSpawner.exe application on your render slaves/nodes, then you most likely have a piece of security software that is blocking the application from running. If you're running Windows Vista, the first place you want to look is in the file properties. Just right click DRSpawner.exe, and then click on "Properties". Then in the "General" tab, towards the bottom of the window, there should be a little section titled "Security". You should see a little button that says "Unblock", if the application is being blocked by Vista's wonderful security features. Please feel free to yell at Microsoft for me.

If you're not running Vista, or you are running Vista, but don't see an "Unblock" button in the General Properties window, then you're most likely dealing with an issue with whatever 3rd party security software you have installed. Norton, McAffee, and NOD32, are just a couple common examples of security suites that can potentially block applications from running. You will need to find out what security suite you're using, and then go from there. To find the Vista security thing that I mentioned earlier, all I did was google "Vista unblock application".

[brandonlynne]

Re: render slaves

I have had a similar situation today. Laptop and Desktop computers, both on same physical network.

Both Windows XP (one home and one pro)
Both with disabled firewalls
Both can see and ping one another (via command line)
But the Desktop computer refuses the connection (according to the render log).

Anyone able to fix the problem by changing something other than firewall settings?

Thanks again.

[Sando]

Re: render slaves

Hi all,

I have had a few problems with this in the past but have got it working now. So I will attempt to help.

I am using Windows XP x64 on my primary machine and Windows Vista x64 as the the slave and it works fine, so mixing the operating systems shouldn't be a problem. I have also tried XP x64 (Primary) and XP pro 32bit (slave) and that has worked fine too. I haven't tried any other combinations. I have found that if the slave machine is not at least equal specs as the primary machine then you can run into problems as the slave machines DR can crash.

1. Make sure that your slave machines can handle the renders
2. Check your firewall settings. Also check that your virus scanners firewall settings and also that your virus scanner is allowing the other machines to connect to each other.
3. Set up and check your gateway / IP settings.
3. Check that each machine is connected to each other by doing a ping.
4. Try mapping drives and see if each machine can read each others drives.
5. If at all possible, don't use windows user log in. Try to use or make sure you have admistrator rights. I found this a real problem with vista.
7. Make sure all the machines are running the same DR version.


Setting up for DR. I'm sure that most of you have set this side of things up with problems but I will go through how I have it set up.
In Rhino go to your V-Ray render options and under System

1. Enable distributed rendering
2. Enable assest collection
3. "Mode" - Send to each node.
Go into settings. Add your servers. A note here that I found problems when using named servers as opposed to gateway numbers. I would say to avoid using a "name" and just use the gateway no as your name. This is of course the number you used in your initial gateway / IP set up. Now resolve the servers to make sure that they are connected.

It is best to have a professional come and help you set up your networking. That way you are 100% sure that the machines are linked properly.

If you are doing large renders and are needing to load vrmaps from a file then this is another kettle of fish. Let me know if you need help on this and I can explain this.

I hope this helps.