Distributed Rendering

[prey1979]

I have ifnally got my rendreing farm here at my firm and i have set it all up and installed vray for DR on the slave machines. VERY PAINLESS AND EASY!!! however i have 2 questions hopefulyl that can be answered. 1) currently when i send my scene for DR the render dialogue pops up and i am unable to continue working while the render farm works away and my machine isnt even renderign anythign its just waitign for the farm to finsih how can i let the farm do its thing and let me conitnue to work and then notify me when its done so i can get the image? 2)can i share irradiance maps with the rest of the render slaves? if i calc one on my machine and then send the job to DR can i save the irradiance mapf ro them to use?

i hope this was clear? and thanks in advance for even reading it !
i love my vray

[prey1979]

more problems

i have looked at my rendering farm and all of the slave machiens have the spawner as a service. The service ssays it is stoppe dbut when i turn them on they go from on to off and say they are automatic and will start when needed is this right? secondly when i try rendering nothign happens

[shytigercp]

re

Make sure every slave has all the plugins, bells and whistles as the computer you're working on. (I run spawner as an application not a service)
If a slave is giving me problems and it will not start rendering, I go over to it, stop the spawner, start up a session of max, and load the scene I'm DR'ing. 9 times out of 10 I'll have *.dlo or some file missing because I've installed or udated something on my main machine that I use (Max will let you know). Look at your network. Make sure your machines are all shared out and named correctly. I once had a problem w/ a slave beause the computer name started with numeric character....78902...I change it to sl78902 and everything went smooth. Sometimes when a server won't start....and everything is set up correctly, I stop the spawner, go to my spawn temp directory, erase all the files in that folder and restart the spawner. It usually starts rendering after that....I don't why it does that. Once all is in place hold your nutz, hit render and pray for rain.

ST

[plastic_]

i use an app called syncromagic to clone plugin dll's and scripts to every rendernode. i just copy the entire max folder of my workstation, so i never get problems with missing files.

it also works with standard batchfiles, here is an example:

set rendernodes=BLA1 BLA2 BLA3
FOR %%A IN (%rendernodes%) DO @xcopy c:\3dsmax5 \\%%A\$c\3dsmax5 /E /A /Y
attrib -A c:\3dsmax5 /s

this only copies new files or files that changed.
it is a bit of a hack, because it only works if no backup program removes the archive attribute of the files.
a dedicated sync app will do a more reliable job.