Distributed rendering on animation

[lcrivell]

Hi,
When I do a distributed rendering of an animation (using the vray-included DR capabilities), how will the slaves be attributed, one slave per frame, or will all slaves contribute for each frame ?
Thanks.

[ivaylo.ivanov]

All salves are processing the current frame.

[lcrivell]

Thanks,
Wouldn't it be quicker to have each slave doing a different frame ? Because if the animation is long but each frame is pretty quick to render, then the local machine will have finished the current frame render while still sending the corresponding vrscene to the slaves, and will therefore end up in having rendered the whole animation alone.

[ivaylo.ivanov]

There are render managers that can work in this way also. Sending jobs frame by frame doesn't require special care from V-Ray though and doesn't need to be built-in.

[lcrivell]

Ok. And does Vray send the whole vrscene to the slaves at the beginning, or just frame 1, then when frame 1 is rendered, vray sends frame 2... ?

[ivaylo.ivanov]

The render managers can deal with this also. They can start Maya batch and export vrscene for whatever frames they want. V-Ray's DR itself sends the whole scene at the beginning. This is something that can be revisited in future since it can be slow for heavy animations.

[Morbid Angel]

You typically never want to render animations with DR. Reason being - if your frame is quick, then it takes longer to load and start the render on slaves then to complete the frame. Also, if a few buckets wait to finish other slaves will idle entirely until those finish.

Best practice is as ivaylo said - submit animation as single frame per machine.

How this is handled - if you use built in backbuner, then a scene is read from central location and render manager (back burner) decides which frame is allocated to which machine. Other render managers do the same thing pretty much.

[lcrivell]

Clear, thanks.

[pechart]

You typically never want to render animations with DR.

Well, you can use DR to render animations more efficiently if you're using Maya plugins that you don't have many renderlicenses for. (Dunno if this ok with the terms of use of all softwares, though.)