Transferring assets DR

[pietervanstee]

Hi,

I'm using the DR function for some time now.
Can someone let advise me what the best way is to get your assets across to all the render nodes?
Usually this is taking quite some time especially when the scene has just been opened.
At the moment I'm working with a combination of collecting and syncing my resoureces, which takes quite some time, but when it's setup it renders loads quite fast.
The other way is letting vray sync the asset files but looks like this is taking a long time.

Working with the assets on a central server isn't an option for us as we're used to work with 2-5 Gb of assets and loading it would take way too long if they remain shared on the server.
So we've setup a sync between our server and our workstations so we can work on local M2 memory.

Any tips/advice? Thanks!

[Syclone1]

IMHO either way is not faster than the other, either your slaves are pulling maps from a central point or you are sending those maps to each slave from your computer works out to pretty much the same and one of the major things I think holding you back may be network speed and that is the only thing you can really upgrade I think to get the loading times down.

For me I have a folder on my workstation that is shared so my slaves have access and I use the network path in my maps paths in max so I don't have to use the transfer missing assets when using DR and the slaves pull the needed maps from that folder.

[pietervanstee]

Hi Dave,

Thank you for your reply.
Indeed the networkspeed could be better I guess.
However the setup I was going for was to have the project assets synced before you start your renders.
So I usually collect all my assets to a local folder to speed things up.
If you either send them per render via a shared folder or using the function in vray to transfer missing assets this takes quite some time.
Especially when rendering testrenders under 2K, larger renders over 4K take longer so the sync can complete before the render nodes kick in.

Having the assets locally on each node works the quickest, but the setup isn't the easiest, especially to make sure all the assets are up to date on each node.

One other thing: the transfer missing asset option from vray isn't the best solution I guess, however this has the option to keep the assets in cache, I presume this isn't kept after switching projects/restarting max? Any ideas on this?

Thanks!

[vlado]

The assets in the cache folder are kept between projects and between 3ds Max restarts. The cache folder can be limited either by size or by date and you can control that from the DR settings window. Maybe the default size is too low for your projects?

The transfer functionality can defintely be improved and it?s on the ?to do? list.

Best regards,
Vlado