DR or backburner....please help

[carlangas]

Hi all,

I have just started to do animations, a lot of things to learn, anyway...Ive never used backburner or distributed rendering. which of the two methods would work better for me, I only have a two computer setup (if it matters at all). I tried searching for the info without any luck. I apoligize if this has been asked before, any pointers would be appreciated

[jacksc02]

are you rendering still images or animations?

[DaForce]

Re: DR or backburner....please help

I have just started to do animations

[jacksc02]

dur, ok use backburner.
Do you have moving objects in your scene?

[DaForce]

Hey CJ..... ZIINNNGGG

[carlangas]

hi, no objects will be moving.

[jujubee]

Any particular reson to use backburner for animation?

[shaneburger]

I am very curious about this as well, since I seem to have vrayspawner dropping out after a few hours of rendering.

Also, I don't seem to be getting the benefit of the multi-frame incremental irradiance map. Each time a frame is rendered, it takes just as long as if it didn't already have a previous frame's information... yet nothing is moving except for the camera!

[Dra(hen]

DR is primarily intended for large still images that otherwise would take 12 or more hours on a single machine. It allows multiple machines to work together to produce one image. This is managed by the Vray Spawner program.

Backburner is a network rendering manager that is bundled with MAX. It allows multiple machines to work on an animation sequence, by assigning one frame to each computer in the network. One machine is designated the Render Manager and runs the manager application. The render nodes then receive their instructions from the manager. You connect to the manager from your 3ds max application, (by checking "use network rendering" in your render dialog) and submit the render job to the queue. The manager then begins assigning tasks to the render nodes (which are running the server application). As each machine completes a frame it is saved to a network drive, and the machine is assigned another frame and so on until the animation is completed.

With a two computer setup, you would be best served probably by using DR for large res still frames as mentioned above. For animations however backburner will not really be useful. You need to have one machine dedicated to running manager. Your manager can run server as well, and if you only have one copy of MAX this may be what you have to do. Run Manager on one machine, and MAX on the other. Submit the render job and close max. Then start server on both machines.

If you have two copies of max the process for you is much simpler. Open your animation file on both machines. Say your animation is 200 frames. Set one machine to render 0-100 and the other to render 101-200.