c-boogie

That's an interesting idea. Unfortunately (for me) the parent company doesn't allow any automatically synchronizing applications like that. Security or bandwidth issues . . . take your pick I guess. But all of our offices are connected through fairly substantial connections. Not nearly LAN speeds but not DSL either (I think my office has a 50mb fiber connection to the main office). So I can store my files here on my server, and they are accessible in the main office (and vice versa). I've tried storing all of my scene assets (maps, proxies, etc.) on the servers in the main office (so that they are accessible faster to the render nodes up there), but opening my scenes here are painfully slow. I guess I'm wondering how much of the scene is transmitted each time. Is my local machine holding on to the geometry and calcs (LC and Irr) and only sending the appropriate data to the render node on a bucket by bucket basis? Or is it transferring the ENTIRE scene to each render node and then only sending back the information for the buckets it renders? One thing that the previous post reminded me of is that we're still on Vray 2.4 still. Part of this upgrade is moving to Vray 3 and it sounds like there are additional features in the DR field that might be helpful (like "trasfer missing assets").

I've been running a small farm in my office for about 10 years now. We have about 15 dedicate machines and about 20 more office computers that kick on at night. We use backburner for the most part, but often take over a few of the dedicate boxes to run spawner for larger or more complicate still renderings. This all works just fine. Our corporate HQ has decided to supplement the farm with an additional farm in our main office. They have another 12 dedicated servers up there and are set up in a similar fashion to my office. The idea is that our rendering resources will eventually be consolidated there and will be opened up to everyone in the company. So my first task is to get Spawner running in this WAN environment. On it's most basic level, I have it running just fine (unc paths, permissions, services, etc.) I have that working like a champ. However, the issue I'm running into is figuring out how to make this work more effectively. When I was using the dedicated machines on my LAN, access speed for my local machine and the dedicated boxes were equal. Now in this WAN scenario, if my scene is large enough or has a lot of linked assets (proxies, larger maps, xref's, etc.) the machines in the remote office take 20-30 minutes to show up in the vray log window. So . . . what exactly is Spawner transferring to each machine? The entire scene? Just the maps and network assets? i think i just need a cleared understanding what is happening "under the hood" when spawner is running. Does anyone out there run a system like this? If so, any tips or lessons learned? Any insight would help.

it looks like your second machine doesn't have permission to ready from where ever you are storing your maps. if setting the paths to UNC paths didn't fix it, try to double check the permission on the folder where your scene assets are stored. You can either run the DR as an application and it will assume the rights of the user you are logged in as . . . or if you run it as a service, try running the service with your logon credentials (as opposed to a local service).

My personal computer bit the dust, but my work generously allowed me to take home my workstation once it's replacement comes in (soon). Both the personal computer and the one I'm bringing home have nVidia 5000K's in them. The newer machine (a Dell T5600) has two PCIe slots. Is it possible to run BOTH graphics cards? If so, is there any real advantage? I use Max and Vray daily but haven't really ever done much with the GPU. I do mostly arch vis work, AE, and am just starting to get into Houdini (baby steps). Is this even possible?

I start almost every project with the client provided CAD files. Almost 100% of the time I clean them up in AutoCAD or Civil 3D, save them, then do a save as, and then move all of the content to 0,0 so that Max deals with it better. Well, I was playing around with the civil view importer the other day and realized it has a basic x and y offset variable so that when you import the model comes in closer to the origin. It even recommends a value for you to get you close. This is amazing, but it only seems to be available when importing a roadway corridor or other "civil view" objects. My question is why isn't this available on EVERY CAD import? This would be amazingly helpful when I get updated CAD info and I just want to import parts of into my scene. I would love to not have to create a duplicate file, just to keep Max from exploding with data so far from the origin. Has anyone seen a tool out there that would add this functionality to the AutoCAD import screen? A script or a plugin - I'm not above paying for it if its going to help me out in my day to day work.

Hi - long time reader, first time poster here. I wish I had something more exciting to ask as a first post but I'm at my wits end with somewhat of an IT issue. We have 4 XP64 workstations, a small render farm on Server2003 64bit, and a server set up as the manager (server 2003 std). Last week we added Max2011 into the mix on all the workstations, render boxes, as well as the manager. At the same time, I upgraded my workstation to Win764bit (we had some downtime). After some fighting with backburner to get it up and running with Max2011, all the workstations and renderboxes were humming away . . . except my Win7 machine. It shows up in backburner, but never picks up a job. If any other workstation submits a job to the manager, my machine name doesn't show up in the list of available server. If I right-click on my PC's name in the monitor, it doesn't list any plugin versions. If I right-click on any job in backburner and select "edit settings" I get an extremely crippled display with only about 20 settings listed (normally the list is about 3x this length). All of the other workstations are working well - submitting job, picking up frames, rendering, etc. I can submit jobs from my Win7 machine (and backburner recognizes my computer) but it just doesn't pick up a frame. I've uninstalled and reinstalled all of my max versions but keep getting the same results. Is there some sort of issue with Win7 that I might have overlooked? Searching the web there are obviously loads of little quirks, but I can't seem to find one that sounds like this. Any thoughts? Any help at all is greatly appreciated.