DR cached bitmaps?

[dlparisi]

Do bitmaps used during DR get cached on the local machines? I know any missing assets get transfered and saved in the VRAY CACHE folder but what about the non-missing ones? Reloading textures seems to take a long time.

[vlado]

No, textures that are not transferred as part of the "transfer missing assets" functionality are not cached.

Best regards,
Vlado

[dlparisi]

Thanks Vlado. Does anyone know of any way to easily cache network resources on a local machine so they are transparent to the requesting program (i.e. all of my usual bitmaps use UNC paths)?

[tashko.zashev]

Maybe some of the asset collector scripts available in Scriptspot will do the job.

[dlparisi]

A somewhat easy workaround was to simply not allow the DR nodes access to the server paths where the bitmaps are stored. This causes all of the bitmaps to not be found and hence they get cached by the main workstation. Even so, after everything gets nicely locally cached I really didn't see a noticeable speed increase. It seems that the main slowdown was really 3ds max loading the bitmaps, not necessarily network speed to the bitmaps. I'm on a gigabit network and even when the assets are local cached I get the same 30-40MB second throughput (either network or disk access IO). Still investigating...