DR Slaves

[glorybound]

Using DR when do the slaves actually start contributing? Currently When I send the scene I'll get a list of hosts, but nothing happens during the prepass. Nothing actually happens until I start/stop the vray spawner when it starts rendering. Normal? If I start stop prior to rendering, during the prespass, it'll say scene loaded, but the slaves don't start contributing until render time.

[thablanch]

I would say it is depending on how long it takes to load the scene, your network speed and machines spec. I had scenes that were too small, so the main computer could start the rendering before the other ones were kicking in.
For the start stop thing:

For the machines that are running the DR, I do restart them once a day, each morning, and it does the job. No need to restart them during a job, unless there is somekind of "oops" happening
For the machines using DR as a service.. I think they have been running for over a month without restarting.

[vlado]

For larger scenes, it may help to turn on the "Compress files on save" option for 3ds Max.

Best regards,
Vlado

[arobbert]

Are you using a pre-calculated irradiance map? If so and it is large it can slow things down, especially if the server is slow.

[glorybound]

I have tried pre-calculated irradiance map and it works sometimes. I get strange things happening in my scenes so I don't use it often. i will try to compress on save to see if that helps me out.