Set Certain Nodes to Render Certain Effects?

[tommygdawg]

Hey all

Basic question here. I've got two computers networked together for distributed rendering. One machine is a single processor i7, the other is a dual processor Xeon. The i7 is much faster than either of the Xeon's, which is causing a bit of a bottlenock for me. The issue is when the Xeon machine assigns buckets to areas of the image that are more computationally intense, ie glossy reflections. I'm running into an issue where at the end of a render, I'll lose a good 5-10 minutes, sometimes more, because the distributed machine is still churning away on some glossy reflections and/or refractions.

Is there a way to inform certain machines to prioritize certain parts of an image? For example, could I set the i7 machine to prioritize areas with glossy reflections/refractions, and set the dual processor Xeon machine to everything else? I've already tired lowering my bucket size quite a bit, which has helped a lot (currently at a 12x12 bucket), but the distributed machine is still causing me slow downs on some parts of the image.

Any thoughts?

Thank you!
- Tommy

[Svetlozar Draganov]

This is not possible so far but it is on the roadmap, maybe will find a way to implement dynamic bucket splitting via DR and we'll have it even more sensitive for such cases.
As for now the only option is to decrease bucket size so my advice is to go even further with that step, but don't go beyond 5x5 for examples since decreasing bucket side too much also affects render times negatively.
Other option that you have is to optimize those areas that requires lots for processing power, make sure that they are not over-sampled.