DR with local assets on SSD

[pietervanstee]

Hi,

I'm setting up a workflow and I'd like to know if this is the best way to handle this.
I have one workstation and 9 render nodes for the moment.
To speed up my workflow I'm rendering distributed, and to optimize speed and ease of use I'm collecting regularly all the assets to the sceneassets folder (via Project manager plugin)
These assets are stored locally on my workstation but are synced to our central server almost instantly.

Now to render on each node and to get them started asap when you hit render.
I've setup a sync tool to update all the assets in the sceneassets folders (the ones I've selected, just for the active projects just a few GB max each)
All these assets are stored locally on the nodes ssd's
For the moment I haven't found a way yet to activate each node from my workstation to start the sync process so that everything is synced before I hit render.
To test this I'm trying the syncback tool and I wanted to activate the profile via command line via psexec without success...

Is there anyone with a similar approach?
Thanks!

[ivan.slavchev]

Hi Pieter,

I'm not sure that I understood completely your workflow, but anyway - when you run a DR job V-Ray looks for the assets first in the path they are added with and if not found - transfers the missing assets (if "transfer missing assets" option is enabled) locally on the render nodes.
A way to speed up would be to:
- add the assets with UNC paths from a shared location, so that the will not be copied locally on the nodes
- set up a sync between the folders on a certain period of time, if you want to benefit from fast data access locally from the SSD

If you want to run a manual sync between the assets locations - you can set up a pre-render script to do that, but still adding the assets with a UNC paths from the file server seems a cleaner solution.

[pietervanstee]

Hi Ivan,

Thank you for your reply.
If I'm using 12 render nodes to render my image, and the assets are approx 3Gb in total that would be 36Gb in total that has to be transfered just prior to the render.
Or are all renders cached for the next renders?
That would be better than transferring them each time, but still...

Thanks!

[ALEX_SPYROPOULOS]

Have you tried to have a cloned local folder in each machine and use local paths ? I am using a dedicated dropbox account and i have 6 cloned ssds on 5 rendering nodes and a workstation. So all my current max files, material libraries are in e:dropbox/ maps + e:dropbox/current project ..... they are cloned over LAN through dropbox and don't need to travel at the same time...

[pietervanstee]

Hi, Alex

Yes I have. I'm using a mapped drive (P, for projects) so the location can differ.
I have a server setup with a sync service similar to the dropbox one.
Only this syncs each newly created folder on our project share.

So at the moment I use this synctool between my workstation and server.
For each node I use an other sync tool that I can setup for certain folders so that each node gets our active \sceneassets\ folders locally

Only now I'm looking for a way to control this sync tasks to each node
So if a project is finished I can stop that sync and remove the cached/synced files on the nodes.
And add the new \sceneasset\ folders for new active projects...

Thanks for the tip!

[ivan.slavchev]

Only now I'm looking for a way to control this sync tasks to each node
So if a project is finished I can stop that sync and remove the cached/synced files on the nodes.
And add the new \sceneasset\ folders for new active projects...

Maybe a post render script that initiates that can do the trick?