Distributed rendering: half done before other computers join

[ledisnomad]

I'll start by saying I have distributed rendering it set up and working. Problem is, the rendering is over halfway done before the computers join in. It is a a decent size file (2M faces), but simple materials (all 85% gray except an architectural glass), medium resolution (1024x76, and medium quality image sampler, irradiance map, and light cache settings.

Without distributed rendering, it takes about 1m33s.

With distributed rendering (my 8-core machine + 5 other 6-core machines), it takes about 1m3s.

That's good, but I was hoping to do better. I'm rendering a daylight study animation with 960 frames. I'd like to be able to run one draft during the day and one at night to have changed to get feedback and make changes. At 1m per frame, that's 17 hours, which means I can't run a draft during working hours.

Any thoughts on how to optimize it? I'm incrementally updating the irradiance map, but not the light cache. Anything else I can try? Would it be faster to have varioius machines run different sets of frames rather than try to do distributed rendering across them?

[fooprobe]

I'd be surprised to see DR get any faster. It takes about 30 sec minimum just to get the scene started. I think your best bet is to find a way to run faster drafts and avoid DR.

Here are some possibilities, since it's just a draft:

-can you sacrifice render quality to speed it up?

-What about rendering every other frame and then stretching it in post?

-Also you can pre-render your IR-map incrementally every 15 frames or so and then load that map for the actual render. You'll save about 50% in time that way, but of course you'll get some artifacts/flicker.

-How many licenses do you have? back in the day I would render a different sequence on each machine and then comp in post.

[Micha]

It's a known problem since years. Per Bongo a workaround is possible. Bongo checks the output dir for current started frames, so that the user can render an animation at several machines, if the output dir is a network dir. The problem could be that the user has not enough licenses for Rhino/Bong/Vray. The Rhino and the Vray team could find a solution, for example allow the user to render an animation per Rhino/Bongo demo. Maybe for Vray a special animation license mode could be installed (Rhino file can't be saved, only rendered frames).