backburner as alternative to Vaay's Distributed Rendering?

[gustojunk]

Hi all,

After many many months passing by and still seeing a lot of problems and inconsistencies with DR, I'm considering the option of using Backburner for my distributed renderings. A fix for everything seems around the corner, but I need a solution to fit my workflow now. Besides I need the added flexibility of not depending on a Vray-centric workflow. I'm very satisfied with Vray's quality and speed. But if tomorrow something better comes around I want to be able to embrace it quickly. I'm not a die-hard of anything other that to what's best for my needs today. Also, even today there are things were I could make render passes using Scanline for certain things, and having DR not dependent on Vray would allow me to do that.

I also read this link from Christopher Grant/ Dave Buchhhofer:
http://vray.info/topics/t0116.asp

Even though their sound very enthusiastic about the whole DR thing, their experiences have prompt me to do nothing but looking desperately for an alternative to DR. Not even in my wildest nightmares I want to be dealing with all those issues day in day out. Let alone when I'm under extreme pressure for some tight deadlines.

I'm considering using Backburner's render strips. But I have to consider certain shortcomings:

1. Last time I tried it (with Vray 1.09.xx) the render strips were inconsistent, some of them missed maps and some passes.

2. Then I also saw on this forum that Richard [Rosenman] was having pixel shifting issues with render strips too (which apparently has been fixed?)

3. Another reason I want to consider Backburner strips is that Vray's DR is not supporting proper G-buffer output to work well with PSD manager (that problem has not been addressed AFAIK, and Vlado never responded to my inquire http://www.chaoticdimension.com/foru...226&highlight=)

4.Another DR's shortcoming is that I have to put my maps in every slave machine (is this also a limitation with Backburner?)

5. Scheduling of jobs will be extremely useful, so will be being able to use all slave machines but not tie up resources of master machine, so I can keep working (again hoping Backburner will let me do that)

6. ROIP (render over IP ) is also very desirable to share render time with a couple of colleagues. I know 'in theory' Vray's DR can do this, however I have not seen anybody succeeding with getting thru firewalls and routers though. Can I achieve this with Backburner too?


ANY help, or sharing of experiences from others will be extremely helpful and I will greatly appreciate it.

Gustavo

[percydaman]

4.Another DR's shortcoming is that I have to put my maps in every slave machine (is this also a limitation with Backburner?)

I have not had to do this to render DR successfully.

[Lucetius]

Backburner is a great tool. Here are a few comments.

#1. As we have learned the hard way, use UNC naming and your missing maps will return!! All our files are on networked storage. We used to use mapped drives and had problems with strip rendering. Shifting to UNC naming has solved that. No problems since.

#2. Never had this problem??

#3. Don't use PSD manager. Hopefully someone else can comment.

#4. We've never had to do this with DR or Backburner. again, all our files are on network storage.

#5. Yes it will. I'm not sure if you can set specific start times for jobs but you can set up dependencies: i.e. a job wont start till another is finished. and render slave groups that can be set as active during diffferent times of the day.

#6. Yes you can. We do it occasionally when we have a large job. This is where being able to use Mapped drives would be helpful. What we try to do is minimize the amount of network traffic. i.e. have the remote rendering slaves only pull the job across the network and not the maps, Vraymesh, etc. with mapped drives, all you have to do is re-point the drive mapping on the remote machines and your good to go. We've had pretty good success with this in the past with 1.1SDSL lines on both ends. Recently, we've had problems using mapped drives and have had to abandon using the remote machines. Our I.S. guy believes the Mapped drive issue has something to do with DNS and is looking in to it.

Hope this helps.

[flipside]

Backburner is a great tool. Here are a few comments.

#1. As we have learned the hard way, use UNC naming and your missing maps will return!! All our files are on networked storage. We used to use mapped drives and had problems with strip rendering. Shifting to UNC naming has solved that. No problems since.

Isn't a file selected from a mapped drive the same as UNC naming?

If I do this in explorer:



and then navigate through these bottom 2 paths (my 2pc network ) in max for selecting textures, isn't that the correct way?

wouter

[gustojunk]

thanks everybody for the comments so far. a couple more questions:

1. What's UNC naming? And how do I tell Max/Vray to use such naming?

2. I don't see anybody confirming that backburner's render strips actually works for Vray. Is anybody using (succesfully) this method?

Thanks

[Dynedain]

Flipside, when I navigate using that method in Max, I get my paths as being

M:fooar

instead of

\Machinesharefooar

[dbuchhofer]

dont forget the bitmap path editor.. under utilities, it rox.

[flipside]

dynedain, when i use it the path looks as follows:

\aversis-dualdocsRAID
endertest