Network rendering

[lightboy]

Is there a way to make network rendering more efficient. I have upgraded to next and have two render node licenses.
My 2 machines are a threadripper (16core) 3.9 ghz and an older intel ( 6 core). 4.2 ghz
What I have noticed is if the frames have short rendering times in the 20 sec to 30 sec range or so that it is seldom that the render slave will pickup a bucket to render ( I think because it is a slower system), is there a way to make it render whole frames for each computer and utilize both computers on short frames better?

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Rendering a frame per machine is your best solution, you can use progressive sampler and set a time limit per frame if you want
This tool by Alex Kurcera does a good job
http://vrscenegui.de/

[lightboy]

Hi Muhammed
Thanks for the reply.
How would you get vray to render a frame per machine? Vray always tries to split the frame up but my threadripper computer is finished the frame before my intel cpu gets a chance to render then what it has processed looks like it gets thrown out and then goes to the next frame and the same thing happens. On render tests I know the frame time per frame is short but I have some scenes with 1100 frames so even though the 6 core is slower it would still make a difference to the final render time. How would the tool by Alex Kurcera help me?
Guess I'm really used to modo's network rendering where I have a choice to split the frame up or send whole frames to each computer on the network.

Thanks
Keith

[Muhammed_Hamed]

How would you get vray to render a frame per machine?

This is exactly what vrsccene GUI does, you will be able to export multiple bat files to submit a frame per machine, many people rely on this workflow for rendering animations
Even if you have multiple GPUs per machine, you will be able to render a frame per GPU using the same workflow
If you are on Skype, there are many people who rely on this for all their rendering in Modo/V-ray chat.. and Alex himself is usually active there

Best,
Muhammed

[vladimir.nedev]

Is there a way to make network rendering more efficient. I have upgraded to next and have two render node licenses.
My 2 machines are a threadripper (16core) 3.9 ghz and an older intel ( 6 core). 4.2 ghz
What I have noticed is if the frames have short rendering times in the 20 sec to 30 sec range or so that it is seldom that the render slave will pickup a bucket to render ( I think because it is a slower system), is there a way to make it render whole frames for each computer and utilize both computers on short frames better?

We don't have an automatic solution for this.

Since you have only two machines, you can
1. figure out how many frames each can render for the same amount of time
2. split the frames in two sequences based on that, e.g. 100 frames for the faster machine, 50 frames for the slower
3. Start V-Ray Standalone with Use distributed rendering enabled and Use local machine disabled for the slower render slave and its 50 frames
4. Disable distributed rendering in the Preferences and start a render from inside Modo and the 100 frames

This way you won't have to manually start a render on the slave, and you can see the progress for both sequences on your main machine.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[lightboy]

Thanks for the replies everyone. Got it up and going for a short while then I went to re-render some files today and now it's telling me I'm out of licenses!
Checked the server manager and now it says I only have one render licence .
I know that license issues should not be in this forum but geez I went through hell just doing the upgrade and it took a while to get it sorted. out. Now I'm back to this again down one render node. it's getting to be to much with the time difference for support starting to think that vray is just to much of a hassle.
They really need to find a way to sort these license issues out quickly.

[delina.georgieva]

We have now answered to your email. All your active licenses are tied with the requested online licensing account. Please let us know if you need any further help or information.

[jeffkrigstein]

Hi all,

Thanks for all the advice above. I am facing a similar challenge, so thought this would be the place to ask it.

I have historically used Modo's native renderer and a 3rd-party render manager called Smedge. This has allowed me to tap into a collection of 8 render slaves (using CPU only) and queue up as many renders at one time as I need, sometimes rendering straight for a week without needing me to interact with the machines.

I now have licenses for V-Ray for Modo but I can't work out how to achieve the same workflow with rendering animations.

The vrscene GUI tool looks like it assists in distributing work for a single scene across the network. Can you use it as a render manager to assist in queuing a dozen scene files at a time? If not, does any 3rd party render manager exist that is compatible with V-Ray for Modo?

Thanks for any advice.

- Jeff

[ivan.slavchev]

The distributed rendering mechanism distributes each frame to be rendered by all machines and cannot be used to queue jobs. I think Deadline from Thinkbox supports Modo rendering, possibly other RM support it too.

[jeffkrigstein]

Thank you very much for the recommendation, Ivan! I will definitely check out Deadline.

If there are any other RMs that anyone would recommend for a Modo + VRay workflow then please feel free to chime in.

- Jeff