Mac Workstation and Windows Slaves DR without transfer Assets possible?

[tomschmid]

Hello

Is there a way to get this working?
Distributed Rendering with Mac Master and Windows Slaves without "transfer Assets" on?
And if not do you plan to implement it in the future? It would be great because i dont like to work with windows but like the speed of Epycs.
Often the transfer time is longer then the rendering time.

[aleksandar.kasabov]

Hello tomschmid,

Can you please clarify if you have all your assets on a network drive, shared between your windows and mac machine? If that is the case, you can run DR between both machines with "transfer assets" turned off. All you need to do is add the -remapPath (and map both paths accordingly) command when starting the server on your Windows machine. So the command line should look something similar to this:

C:\Program Files\Maxon Cinema 4D 2023\plugins\V-Ray\res\libs\win64>vray.exe -server -remappath="/Volumes/GoogleDrive/Shared drives/yourTexturePath"="G:\Shared drives\yourTexturePath"

Keep in mind that this will work if all your textures are in a single folder. If you have multiple folders, you can specify them in an XML file and use that. More information about remapping and other command lines can be found here.

Let me know if that is of help.

[sirio76]

like the speed of Epycs.

Last time I check Epycs were not a wise choice for Vray, in 2p configuration the performance is suboptimal and compared to 1p configuration Threadripper are faster and cheaper.
Regardless of this, transferring assets should be fast, especially if you have a 10Gb connection (unless you have several GB of data).
In my experience the thing that take the most time is exporting vrscene and that happens on the local machine, physically transferring the assets to the slave is only the final step.

[tomschmid]

I testet threadripper 3970x against 2x epyc 7742. its 2 times the speed (smt turned off). same price on ebay 2000usd for each setup. So double the speed for same price


and i have 10g but 100 of small files take a lot of time against 1 big file. With many little files 10g isnt much faster then 1g

[sirio76]

I testet threadripper 3970x against 2x epyc 7742. its 2 times the speed (smt turned off).

Not a fair comparison 2x7742 have 128core/256threads, a single 3970x have 32core/64threads, so 4x the core, 4x the price (CPU only of course), and barely 2x the speed, as said suboptimal.
If you already have the Epyc system then great, but for Vray choosing a 2p AMD system over a single Threadripper is not wise financially.
Vray DR sends only one file containing all the data for the standalone to the slave machine, it do not export many small files over the network.

[tomschmid]

Both system have roughly the same price on ebay (2000usd).. the epyc cpus run much cooler and need only 500W compared to 300W threadripper system. Of course if you compare new prices it doesnt make sense.

[tomschmid]

But back to my initial question. Is it possible or is it planed for the future?

[aleksandar.kasabov]

Hello tomschmid,

Can you please clarify if you have all your assets on a network drive, shared between your windows and mac machine? If that is the case, you can run DR between both machines with "transfer assets" turned off. All you need to do is add the -remapPath (and map both paths accordingly) command when starting the server on your Windows machine. So the command line should look something similar to this:

C:\Program Files\Maxon Cinema 4D 2023\plugins\V-Ray\res\libs\win64>vray.exe -server -remappath="/Volumes/GoogleDrive/Shared drives/yourTexturePath"="G:\Shared drives\yourTexturePath"

Keep in mind that this will work if all your textures are in a single folder. If you have multiple folders, you can specify them in an XML file and use that. More information about remapping and other command lines can be found here.

Let me know if that is of help.

[tomschmid]

oh cool thank you.. this should also work if i have 2 local folders on each machine with the same textures in it. so i have no network latency right?
and this works also with subfolders automatically or all images have to be in just 1 folder?

[aleksandar.kasabov]

Hello tomschmid,

this should also work if i have 2 local folders on each machine with the same textures in it. so i have no network latency right?

Yes, this will also work if you have 2 folders on each machine with the same textures inside. You will need to remap the path, leading to those folders and then it should work correctly.

and this works also with subfolders automatically or all images have to be in just 1 folder?

This should also work with sub-folders, as long as you have the same sub-folder names and file structure. Keep in mind that in order for this to work, the file extension also needs to be the same. For example, this won't work if the file on one of the machines is .jpg and the other is .jpeg. I hope this is of help.

[tomschmid]

Great, thank you. I will test it. Does this also work with vrmesh?

[aleksandar.kasabov]

Yes, that also works with .vrmesh files and other assets as well.