When performing a distributed render, what is happening...

[tricky]

I am trying to improve processes here between our artists and our farm. We make continual use of DR to get images rendered on time. Jobs are becoming more complex and Max files larger as each month goes by. We do have times when it takes a long time for nodes to 'kick-in' and have their buckets visible in the VFB.

When we click 'render' from the workstation, what happens? Does it essentially save the max scene (perhaps compressed to around 300MB or so) and then send that scene over our network to each of the render slaves? Obviously on a 1GB network, there could be a bit of a bottleneck here, particularly with all our artists submitting their jobs. Or does the host session of 3dsmax simply send some sort of 'instruction' for each bucket to each render slave?

If an artist renders a scene and the render completes, but then a change to the model is made (changed materials/changed geometry/lighting etc) and he then re-renders, is the entire max scene saved and re-sent across the network?

Basically, what happens when an artist clicks render for a distributed render?

(hope that makes sense!!)

[Morne]

Your 1st geuss was the right one. When you click render, it saves the file and send the max file over the network to each slave. If you have a bunch of machines that could be slow over the network. Once it arrives, the slave must 1st OPEN the file before it can start to render. If you have a large file, this again can take some time. While your machines is already happily rendering, some slaves may only still be receiving the file while others may be busy opening the file. While your machines already checked the paths etc for the textures, the slave checks that during opening, so again adds load onto the network. Once open and checked, it can happily start rendering. In the old days, it 1st had to do its own LC before it could start to render, even though your machine may have already done a LC. I think Vlado mentioned this is now fixed in the latest versions?

If you have even just 1 texture not pathed correctly, max will check all the paths in the user paths, so again, this may take some time

[Morbid Angel]

I think how DR is working is as best as it can get with its current setup. The way I envision DR in the future would be those machines that perform as DR slaves actually have your scene open in real-time mirroring its current state, when you click "render" it already has most recent up to date scene in ram so it just starts render. (That just my imagination of things).

In reality, the larger your studio becomes the more people work / use the network you have to expand. Upgrading the network to 10G will solve the problem but its very expensive.

What I did on my workstation is I've actually created a bonded network connection by using both network ports from my workstation to the server. So this gave me a 2Gib speed vs regular 1Gib.

But your switch / server must also be able to handle the load. If it can, this might improve things a tiny bit

[tricky]

Thankyou chaps. I figured this was the case. 10 years ago, 3dsMax files rarely used to be more than 10MB. Now 300MB+ is common.

[tricky]

Is all this the same with progressive rendering? I presume so.