Best material organization of distributed renders??

[pshupe68]

What is the best way to organzie your material paths for Max? I have a pretty extensive library of folders and sub-folders for my textures and I was wondering what the most economical way of having those addressed would be??

Currently I only use a couple of computers to render but am looking at a small render farm and utilizing backburner and Vray distributed rendering.

Can someone please advise me on the best way to organize paths for all the material folders?? Thanks.

Should I place them on the server and make sure that all computers are mapped with similar drive letters? I have loads of sub-folders. Should I try and minimize those folders so I don't have that many paths or does it really matter?? I have tried to select my material folder and clicked all sub-folders and it crashed. I assume because there are too many paths.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Regards Peter.

[DaForce]

Doesnt matter to much how many subfolders you have.. as long as its not too nuts and its neat.

do NOT use mapped driver letters.. you will have troubles. Use UNC paths instead such as //server/textures/blah.jpg
Thats paths are absolute, where as mapped paths depends on how its setup on each machine.
So stick with UNC paths and you will make things a hell of a lot easier for yourself

[pshupe68]

Thanks Daforce. I got the same tip from Jacksc02.

I'll have to look into that. I do have convert file paths to UNC checked in my preference settings.

I have a load of subfolders in my materials directory. I was more using this folder as a place for all my materials: standard, maxwell, and vray. I will check and see if I can streamline the folder structure. That may help!

Cheers Peter.

[jacksc02]

daforce, FYI - UNC paths can be extremely slow and troublesome.
We have mapped drives set up and they seem to be the most reliable and the fastest option as well.

[DaForce]

I have seen slowness in UNC in certain machines.. but im pretty sure that comes down to a windows/network card/network card driver issue.
Comparing my mat3es machine and mine, both similar setups, same version of windows. His taks awhile to find the UNC paths whereas mine is instant.

[meanadam]

I have used nothing but mapped drives for 10 years. Never a problem, unless the mappee isn't turned on.

[jacksc02]

good to hear from another mapped drive believer!

[Jerry]

third that (mapped drive) for about 9 years.

[bluescreen2]

i am mapped too

[tricky]

I have used nothing but mapped drives for 10 years. Never a problem, unless the mappee isn't turned on.

Us too - for about 9 years.

[ene.xis]

it might not have been a problem so far...
but...

by the way how DR working for u guys?

[Dynedain]

I ran into several situations where a mapped network drive can get disconnected and the only way to fix it is a reboot or a 3rd party utility to reconnect.

With UNC there's no problem.

Also, mapped network drives means that windows keeps the drive constantly monitored - which means each installation of antivirus/antispyware is constantly monitoring that drive. This means slowdowns on your network. Also, if it's a mapped network drive, windows will automatically write certain hidden files to the root of the share. This can be a problem in mixed-platform environments where those files show up to other users on other OS. And I don't even want to start to think about what happens when multiple windows machines are overwriting those files.

The reason why UNC may be slower on your network is if you have no DNS in place and are relying on the default peer-to-peer network name recognition that is built into windows (NetBIOS and 'master browsers').

With mapped network drives, you need to make sure to map the drive for the logged in user that will be running backburner. With UNC it's one less thing to worry about when setting up new workstations or render nodes.

If you want to add another network share, you have to go around and make a new mapped network drive for them. If people are used to UNC, you just tell them "hey there's a new share on such and such server".


I vote firmly for UNC.... we had a lot less problems once we switched away from mapped network drives. And contrary to what was mentioned above, UNC is more reliable than mapped network drives, not the other way around.