'Local' assets.

[DanSHP]

Currently we have everything on our network drives. Textures, models, etc.This is causing a bottleneck in our scenes. Long scene asset/texture loading times, long render start times. It's god awful.

I'd like to convince our IT sys admin to move our assets to a drive on our workstations, and have these local folders sync to our network drives as a backup. So if I alter a file/folder on my workstation drive it will reflect this change on the network drive. Ultimately I would like everything local to keep things zippy when we are testing lighting and adding our assets, then we can submit final renders to the farm with 'transfer missing assets' option in DR settings. But we need to have the insurance of a backup on the server in case the workstation drives explode.

How do you all manage your assets paths? Whilst I imagine the above would be possible on an IT footing, I wonder how such a setup would affect other users opening the same file? Given it's using a local path?

Cheers

[^Lele^]

Use a plain filename for the texture.
Add the local path to the texture paths Max looks into, on each workstation.
Sync each to said local path, you should be fine.

[DanSHP]

Use a plain filename for the texture.
Add the local path to the texture paths Max looks into, on each workstation.
Sync each to said local path, you should be fine.

Thanks

So if two users had the same folder structure on their D: drive, and have the relevant path on each machine assigned for texture paths in project paths.This would would work? How would this work for 3d models? Say I had a car asset loaded in from my local drive, then another user loads the file, what needs to be done to ensure both workstations load the 3d asset?

This is not something we've delved into much so kind of new territory.

Cheers

[^Lele^]

Well, you'll definitely need some way to ensure you synch stuff right.

The best possible way *I* have experienced is with synching on max start/scene load (depending on what exactly needs synching. f.e. plugins/scripts too, or not.).
In case of a synch on scene load, a script (or other such tool) should take care of parsing the data on the repository (sitting on the server) and download anything different (and newer? the conditions you'll have to choose yourself.) locally.
If one artist makes changes to any asset, they will need to "publish" it on the server, and the users should then get a push download of the updated asset.

This is the general idea, but the details can be devilishly complicated.
You'll need to ensure the right users only can make edits, and that those edits are approved before forcing them on every other user.
Also, for whatever reason, users may want to hold off updating the local cache (say, they have a different version of the change pushed by another artist).
Lastly, you'll likely need multiple asset copies to ensure you can revert to previous versions.

It's not trivial, by any stretch of the imagination.
Even leveraging things like ShotGrid (formerly shotgun) and Deadline, you will likely need some python thrown in.
It will eventually work, but you should be prepared to a bit of trial and error before it'll do.
There is perhaps some literature on pipelining in general which you could search for, that may help at least clearing up the precise steps you'll need to cater for your case.

[DanSHP]

Thanks Lele.

[dreidesign]

Had the same issue a few years ago and also thought about local copies of the server content on every workstation. But in the end we made the move to upgrade to 10gbe ethernet. At first we upgraded our QNAP NAS we got running quite a few years to a newer 10gbe one. The performance was much better than before but nowhere near to what should be expected, even with all SSD Raid we had at the beginning. We then switched to a self built NAS based on Truenas (old name was Freenas). The performance even with only hdds in it is superb in comparision to the QNAP NAS. Cool side effect of that switch was also that ZFS (the filesystem used by Truenas) supports realtime compression, which means all the photoshop files and everything else is getting compressed saving bandwidth and disk space. Therefor we could also turn off the max scene compression which takes quite long.

Maybe this could be an option for your too.