More Buckets?

[devin]

I have 10 dual core render nodes as well as my 8 core work station and with a single copy of Vray using distributed rendering I can use 10 buckets; that leaves 9 of my machines just sitting there. I've read before that with more copies of Vray I can use more than 10 buckets for distributed rendering. If this is true it's conceivable that I could have up to 28 buckets rendering one scene, but I have to wonder if the increased network traffic and load on my main workstation would actually slow down the final rendered scene. Has anyone ever done this and if so what was the result?

[ene.xis]

one vray license allows you to use 10 machines, not 10 cores afaik!

[DaForce]

yep 1 licence allows 10 machines on DR.. they can be any sort of cpu.. so you could have 10 dual quad core machines.. so a total of 80 cores rendering in DR with one licence.

There is no restriction via backburn however.

[devin]

Wow I had no idea it was counting computers and not cores, I guess I was still thinking about how Final Render used to do it. Thanks a lot guy's!

[3ddesign]

I have 30 buckets rendering. There can be an issue with network traffic if you have slow routers or switches. I had to go with a professional one. See http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpB...837&highlight= I can set my new file server to also be a render node on small and medium scenes but on large scenes with lots of textures and huge IR maps, it can cause problems. I used to use my workstation as file storage, texture library, IR maps, etc. but found that it was too much for the poor machine to handle. Using an inexpensive server helped but didn't solve all the problems until I got the better server. The issues I had were buckets missing texture maps or IR maps, things like that.

Craig

[werticus]

i agree with 3ddesign i had problems until i went to a full blown switch that can handle massive bandwidth internally.

a lot of so called 'gigabit' switches are only that fast on one or two ports at a time.

[devin]

Guy's what kind of switches are you using and how are your systems configured? I'm not a tech guy but from what I understand all my nodes are directly connected to my main machine through a single gigabit switch but when I render I can only get two of my nodes to work at a time. What would be the optimal network hardware setup if I wanted to have the max number of buckets working all at once?

PS. I read throught the post that 3ddesign posted and it's helped a lot, I'm going to do some testing and see if this is really my problem.