Is there any way to send a lightcache render to multiple machines on a network to reduce the render time?
As far as I’m aware NO. I read somewhere in the forum that the LC can not be distributed because of the way it is calculated (that’s about as much as I understand).
This is what i do…
I somehow had the same question. However I asked if i can merge 2 seperate LC which each other just like what you can do with irr map.
What I was told is that the LC information is stored in irr map when set to second bounce. Just look at this thread i started and got lots of support from daForce
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=19248
hope it helps
Ralf
Is there a big difference between dividing a task to multiple cpus and cores and dividing it between different computers?
How does maxwell deal with DR, isn’t that as same as LC?
What maxwell does afaik is renders the exact same view on different computers but uses a different random noise seed for each render - then it takes the results of all of these renders, averages them and makes a final lighting solution from them. You’d get a results similar to using far more light cache subdivs except you can split the result over n computers. Say for example you were doing a single frame with 5000 subdivs, it’d be like doing 5 renders of 1000 subdivs in each with a slightly different random sampling and then making an average of all of those frames to get one nice solution at the end.
You can distribute LC, as long as you don’t intend to save it. You can send an IR/LC to strip rendering in backburner. You will most likely get severe banding where the strips are joined, particularly in low-light areas.
But why not just render the IR/LC on one node (with Don’t render final image checked), autosave, and then distribute the render pass? I do that all the time…
I’ve posted a wishlist item suggesting a way that could speed up DR when utilizing LightCache. It’s not a perfect solution, and it still involves only one machine producing the LC… but it may be an improvement:
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=19275