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Hi all,
Thought I'd share my success in leveraging Backburner WITH Distributed v-ray rendering using Max 15.
My setup is that I have 4 machines with 1 network max license and v-ray 3.x with 6 rendering nodes.
So - the problem:
1. v-ray DR is great - except it ties up the host machine.
2. Backburner is great for animations - but most of my work is Architectural stills and while it offloads the work and frees up my design machine, it leaves my other machines sitting wastefully idle.
My first pass at engaging v-ray in distributed mode through backburner resulted in partial success - but with all but the backburner server machine submitting mapless buckets as they don;t get fed the maps needed to render the scene (Chaos - you should fix this). Now, all the pros will have pipelines that solve this problem...but I have a spaghetti of maps and trying to organize a central share (with 30 subdirectories) was too much brain damage.
So, I wrote a script to:
a) find all maps in a max scene
b) optionally relink them (useful when you;ve been sent or downloaded a project)
c) copy the maps to a specified location (usually a network share that all your workstations can access)
d) optionally erase existing files in that location - or append them.
Combined with setting up the vray_dr.cfg on each machine, I can now send a scene via backburner to a backburner server and all my other machines will engage and render the frame - while my design machine is immediately freed for me to continue work. If this is old hat - apols. But if it isn't let me know and I'll put together a brief how-to along with the max script that powers the relink and copy stuff.
As a benchmark with a sample scene:
1. Standard DR (which locks your design machine): 5m:30s
2. Backburner (frees my design machine but no DR): 11m 23s
3. Backburner + DR: (frees my machine and leverages all machines) : 5m 43s
I'm pretty happy!
Thought I'd share my success in leveraging Backburner WITH Distributed v-ray rendering using Max 15.
My setup is that I have 4 machines with 1 network max license and v-ray 3.x with 6 rendering nodes.
So - the problem:
1. v-ray DR is great - except it ties up the host machine.
2. Backburner is great for animations - but most of my work is Architectural stills and while it offloads the work and frees up my design machine, it leaves my other machines sitting wastefully idle.
My first pass at engaging v-ray in distributed mode through backburner resulted in partial success - but with all but the backburner server machine submitting mapless buckets as they don;t get fed the maps needed to render the scene (Chaos - you should fix this). Now, all the pros will have pipelines that solve this problem...but I have a spaghetti of maps and trying to organize a central share (with 30 subdirectories) was too much brain damage.
So, I wrote a script to:
a) find all maps in a max scene
b) optionally relink them (useful when you;ve been sent or downloaded a project)
c) copy the maps to a specified location (usually a network share that all your workstations can access)
d) optionally erase existing files in that location - or append them.
Combined with setting up the vray_dr.cfg on each machine, I can now send a scene via backburner to a backburner server and all my other machines will engage and render the frame - while my design machine is immediately freed for me to continue work. If this is old hat - apols. But if it isn't let me know and I'll put together a brief how-to along with the max script that powers the relink and copy stuff.
As a benchmark with a sample scene:
1. Standard DR (which locks your design machine): 5m:30s
2. Backburner (frees my design machine but no DR): 11m 23s
3. Backburner + DR: (frees my machine and leverages all machines) : 5m 43s
I'm pretty happy!
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