MAX + VRAY with VMWARE?

[scottfolts1]

Does anyone have any info, technical or anecdotal, about running max/vray in a pc over ip environment?

 

 

The large, multi-location, firm I work for is rolling out a centralized, virtual desktop solution; primarily for admin and revit users. MAX was not part of the testing and my questions are too many to list. VRAY/plug-in licensing, network & distributed rendering, location of render-time assets, and most of all, performance???

[thomascoote]

Does anyone have any info, technical or anecdotal, about running max/vray in a pc over ip environment?

 

 

The large, multi-location, firm I work for is rolling out a centralized, virtual desktop solution; primarily for admin and revit users. MAX was not part of the testing and my questions are too many to list. VRAY/plug-in licensing, network & distributed rendering, location of render-time assets, and most of all, performance???

 

You're talking about logging into a remote PC and working on that PC which has the software and licences installed right?

 

If that's the case, from personal experience it will be no fun at all if you work on anything except small scenes, as in my experience there is always some input lag. Trying to work with large scenes in Max is no fun even if you're sat in front of the workstation. Add input lag into that, I'd start looking for a new job to be brutally honest.

 

I log in remotely most nights to my PC at work, and the only thing it's good for is transferring files or adjusting render settings and sending off renders. Would never try to actually model that way.

[Scott Schroeder]

I tested out using Max on the NVIDIA Grid with the XenDesktop app and it wasn't half bad with a pretty heavy scene. It was almost similar to working locally. However, what is a royal pain is transferring assets and licensing the softwares. For me these apps are great for when you travel and you need to work on something. However, I would never replace my home or at work machine with a virtual desktop. It is still far too clunky of a platform for efficient everyday work.

[Francisco Penaloza]

Some company tried to sell us a similar deal but honestly I was not impressed with it. As Scoot mentioned delay/lag is minimum, it is a way better system than remote desktop or citrix for sure. But unless you have everything in the same server/machines, transferring files can be a nightmare.

 

When they did the test obviously they didn't have our files, but waiting to transfer those large REVIT files it took serious time. it has to be everything integrated.

 

Now the problem that I see is, it is always hard to make understand to IT people that doing visualization requires a lot of computer resources. Those virtual machines can be cloned very easily and it seems ideal to render animations, but the specs of the CPU they were offering seems wimpy to me. Maybe for REVIT, but even the video card where entry level. no way to use GTX in those setups unless it is very custom, and that will add a lot to the cost.

Of course your miles will vary, but I would recommend to check the specs of those machines, if something goes wrong during an animation work it is very easy to just walk to our renders nodes and see what's going on, when everything is remote and controlled by some one else. I don't know if I want to deal with that.

 

my two bites worth of opinion