Swarm question?

[sheehan_partners_nm]

This is more of a technical/harware question, but I need to understand how distributed rendering works on different platforms.

Let's say we are working in a team of three people, and have a small render farm in the office. Swarm will give to each user equally 33% of the render farm CPU power.
When somebody else joins, and he is working in 3ds Max, how is CPU power divided between users? Each of the 4 users will get 25 %, or the Max user will get 50% from the farm, and the rest 50% will be divided between the three Rhino users?

[Peter.Chaushev]

Hello,

When you run two V-Ray processes on the same machine they will gradually try balance an equal amount of CPU usage.
There is, however, a catch. If you engage a render node machine using V-Ray Swarm, the status of the machine will change to "Rendering" and it will not be available for other Swarm clients (V-Ray Swarm is currently available only for V-Ray for SketchUp/Rhino/Revit).
V-Ray for 3ds Max does not yet use V-Ray Swarm, so you can initiate a DR on an already engaged machine independently.
In conclusion, you can use a render node machine to have only one V-Ray DR process initiated through V-Ray Swarm, but you can simultaneously run one or more V-Ray processes together with that one initated either through V-Ray for 3ds Max's DR or V-Ray Standalone.

Additionally, you can set the max number of threads used by the render process initiated through V-Ray Swarm, as described here: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...guration-V-Ray

Let me know if you have any further questions!

Kind regards,
Peter

[sheehan_partners_nm]

Hey Peter, thank you for your answer. I didn't understand though how much power is taken from different platforms? If the render farm is working for a 3dsmax job, and than Rhino kicks in with 3 users, Is the render farm giving each user 25% of the CPU power, or giving 50% to 3ds max and the rest 50% is divided between Swarm users?

Thanks!

[Peter.Chaushev]

Assuming the render farm is a single machine, you would not be able to have more than one simultaneous V-Ray for Rhino render job going on. At this point, V-Ray Swarm can manage only one vray process.
You should, however, be able to use one render node machine for both a V-Ray for Rhino job and V-Ray for 3ds Max jobs at the same time.

If your render farm consists of multiple machines, then each user can use the V-Ray Asset Editor's Swarm goal slider to adjust what percentage of the available computing power should be used. This tool is interactive so changes to usage ratio take effect immediately. For more info about V-Ray Swarm's settings, go to https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...Swarm+Settings
Setting different tags in order to group machines in different combinations can also simplify the management of distributed rendering. (https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...mSettings-Tags)

Kind regards,
Peter

[sheehan_partners_nm]

Thank you very much Peter