Network rendering... does it really work?

[victorwol]

I’m trying to use my renderfarm, I have my textures on a network drive that is shared with the same name for every machine on the network, M:\Textures\ for every machine, but the rendernodes do not find the textures
When rendering with VRAY, no problem with Final Render or Mental Ray. Same with the irradiance maps, all render to a common drive to all the computers but the render nodes do not find it with VRAY. Does it really work at all?


Thanks

[danieljhatton]

I have three PC's. Main PC has a second Hard Disk installed. d:

On this drive I have three folders. Network Renders, Work, and Library.

I have mapped these three folders as drives on every PC. N: W: L:

I open Max files saved in W: Work, and they have materials from L:, they render to N:

When I send these jobs to DR or Backburner I have no problems at all. Something with your setup is preventing it from working. It could be the max files you are opening are working on your local machine finding all your maps, but the paths 'in the max file' on the 'network' machines is still as your local machine. e.g. PC/LIBRARY, instead of PC/L:

If this is the case, which it may not be, than you need to make sure you are opening the max file from your mapped location, and make sure all the maps in that max file are looking to the network folder where you have your maps. This will allow all you machines to 'look' in the same place. If you are still opening max files locally and not from the mapped location then indeed. It does not work.

Dont quote me on this but FR and MR might work slightly differently. They possibly save up the maps where Vray loads them on render. I dont know.

Hope this helps. Good Luck.

[squeakybadger]

have you tried the 'convert file paths to UNC' and 'convert local file paths to relative' in the max options?

[victorwol]

Trying the suggestions, will let you know if works.

Thanks

[horoXhoro]

I used to use network path on textures mapping. cos mapping filesize is not big so there no problem unless there is more than 10 render node take the files from the server it might fail to get the mapping. Cos Window only support up to 10port at one time.more than that will fail. Unless the server is using Windows server.

And nowadays there is more than just mapping for external files. eg. LC maps, IR maps , Proxies. the flies is incredible huge sometimes. SO i start to get fail network getting the resources. so now I my external sources i will copied to all local drive on every single render nodes. eg. C:\maps\project\ and it never failed but sometimes painful to copied to over 20 render nodes hehehe.

my 2 cents.
Cheeers,
Andrew.C

[sv]

I’m trying to use my renderfarm, I have my textures on a network drive that is shared with the same name for every machine on the network, M:\Textures\ for every machine, but the rendernodes do not find the textures
When rendering with VRAY, no problem with Final Render or Mental Ray. Same with the irradiance maps, all render to a common drive to all the computers but the render nodes do not find it with VRAY. Does it really work at all?


Thanks

i'll bet my bottom dollar your experiencing a licence problem.
make sure all your render slaves can see your license properly.
either that, or you're using string not network cable.

[thablanch]

I’m trying to use my renderfarm, I have my textures on a network drive that is shared with the same name for every machine on the network, M:\Textures\ for every machine, but the rendernodes do not find the textures
When rendering with VRAY, no problem with Final Render or Mental Ray. Same with the irradiance maps, all render to a common drive to all the computers but the render nodes do not find it with VRAY. Does it really work at all?


Thanks

UNC path would be my guess. An for your question: does it really work at all? Yes, could not work without it anymore