Do you use DR?

Hello,

This is a poll to help me make some plans for our development - if you take a moment to vote, it will be very helpfull. Thanks!

Best regards,
Vlado

  • All the time
  • Often, but not always
  • Rarely
  • Never
0 voters

Hi Vlado

For stills I use DR all the time.
For animation I use DR 50% of the time and Backburner the other 50%

Regards,
Morne

I use DR all day long, I’m doing all my work with DR and when I have a animation to lunch it’s threw BB, but for setting up the scene and all stuff, DR only.

We currently use DR for test renders etc. For highres stills and animations we generally use BB.

On the subject of using both, do you guys find performance problems if render nodes are used for DR and backburner at the same time.

For instance, if one user is doing local test renders using all rendernodes through DR and at the same time another user is using the render nodes through BB?

I suppose a solution would be to allocate certain render nodes to each, but this is not the most efficient way of making use of all render nodes all of the time.

Thoughts?

DR is crucial…for archviz it is very important to be able to distribute rendering of a single image. i use it all the time. (since it happens to run stable on my setup, i know others where it doesn’t seem to work all the time).
i rarely render animations, so my small renderfarm would be useless without DR.

dr all the time: tests, final low res, final high res.. never used it for animations though.

DR all the time.. btw.. thanks Vray guys for DR, sooo usefull

We use DR every now and then because we only have 2 x64 computers and both are used as workstation.
If I’d have more PCs available I would definitly use it all the time. It’s great!

Personally I use DR at home almost all the time with my little farm. At work it is like Chris says, it is a problem sharing farm boxes between BB and DR efficiently. It would be great if Spawner were more integrated with BB.

Second the motion on BB Spawner behaving together. We use it to do huge models on our 16 gig ram workstations…ones that kill the 8 gig machines on the farm…

Please make it more fool proof cos at times it fails and at time it works.

well, yes. second the wish. once the problem was it often couldn’t make the spawner run, and dr didn’t even start. now, at least here, it tends to be much more stable but even with spawner and client up and running, client’s buckets won’t start render. or sometime they render all black, making dr still a bit hit or miss.

I would if it was a bit more reliable, but it fails to work far too often to use regularly.

I’ve used it once or twice in an emergency - when it has been a great help, and 3 or 4 times i’ve tried to use it just when the farm was dead to get some extra speed.
I only get a few renders out of it before machines start to simply not pick the scene up and it starts to fail.

i second was cubiclegangster said:
after a few renderings one or the other spawner client won’t start to render. this especially happens with big, memory intensive scenes. this is also true for dr over bb. thats usually when i got a bad dream about my images not being finished in the morning.

DR is critical for me. I use it all the time for rendering still images. The latest build is working well for me.

DR is one of the best features vray has, when it works. Spend some time perfecting it and I will be a very happy person!

How many times can I answer “All the time”??? Seriously, I use it constantly (over 6 DR machines) and have very little trouble with it. I’d be so less productive without it. The only problem I have with it is that if I put the main workstation (that also has the license server) in standby, the dr slaves will stop working. In these cases I simply kill the 3dsmax process under the vrayspawner and a new one is started and everything is good. I’ve only noticed this happening on the latest builds though it could have been there before too.

We use DR all day long for test renderings but because it sometimes drops buckets or some of the buckets loose textures I use BB to render out the final image because it’s more reliable. Also on large scenes it’s very slow to start but that is probably the networks fault, it doesn’t matter because it’s invaluable for daily work.

Since Vray 1.5, DR is very reliable for us. It also worked well on previous versions, but it required quite a lot of spawner restarts when dealing with memory intensive scenes or high resolution renders.
Although we have experienced a few problems with DR, they mostly relate to using UNC paths for textures and proxies. It behaves flawlessly when we copy them locally to each machine.
With that said, we use it daily, and it represents an important boost to our productivity.

all the time.
I can’t imagine my work without it any more.

one workstation + 3 dual quad core slaves.
no BB - direct DR for stills, command line rendering through batch files for animations and sequences.

no major problems, apart from occasional spawner shutdowns and compatibility issues (max mostly).