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Matt Sugden

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  1. Hi I'm starting to explore Unreal VR development with Quest 2. Typically when I texture a model for Vray I'm mostly using real world mapping box/cylinder/planar etc, multisub objects with maybe 50+ ids and I don't use single unwrapUVs almost ever. However it seems that the world of real-time requires huge amounts of optimisation to look good, unwrapping textures, projection mapping for normals etc. However unwrapping a model to texture in photoshop seems painful, scaling materials in photoshop is so cumbersome and it means all the textures are all on one map, so then creating the roughness/reflection maps etc is all in one place. It doesn't seem intuitive or flexible. Am I missing some vital workflow here? How are arch vis people approaching the use of adding textures?
  2. I found the issue, here it is for future reference if anyone else discovers this..... It turns out that one of my render nodes had not saved the irradiance maps during precalc (it didn't report this in backburner however), so every 5 frames or so I had a dropped (missing) IR map. I'm not sure why yet. This explains why the issue seemed intermittent, as back burner was trying to use different render nodes to try and complete the erroneous task during the rendering pass. Looking at the folder containing all the IR maps this wasn't immediately obvious at all as there was over 200 of them (minus the missing 20 or so). And I only discovered this by trying to copy all the IR maps locally, which is when I discovered the first missing file, because everything was rendering fine until it hit the first missing IR map. Then Eureka! Back-burner was reporting that there was an issue 'loading the map', but it would have been much more useful if it had reported an error that there was 'no map'!! In retrospect it's the same thing, but if the computer is saying it's having difficulty trying to load a map, it suggests there IS a map.
  3. This problem is driving me nuts!! 3ds Max Backburner is throwing up an issue with loading Irradiance maps. I don't have any other issues with textures, models, render output files etc. It's just irradiance maps that are the issue. It's not even consistent, sometimes a PC will see the file and other times it won't. At one point all the machines saw it then it stopped after a few frames. I suspect it's a file permission issue, but why specifically irradiance maps? And how do I fix? As far as I can see every node is seeing all the files. All my files are stored on a NAS, I use UNC for all file paths. I'm not sure what left there is to try. I've read about setting up user accounts. All the render Nodes are setup identical in software and hardware, and they logon as admin with no user password. Strangely, when I rendered a very simple scene, as a test it seemed to work, could there be a conflict shafting the irradiance maps perhaps? Any ideas of things to try would be appreciated as I'm running out of ideas and time!!!! HELP!!!!!!!
  4. So I'm asking my learned friends......I'm having issues with backburner. After installing a new router into my system, backburner has started flagging up a communication error which I think I have tracked down to an IPv6 issue. It seems that when I switch IPv6 off in the registry of my servers 0x000000FF or 0xFFFFFFFF (I've tried both) and restart the computer, backburner seems to be happy to talk to the manager again, however the strange bit is, when the computer has restarted the IPv6 setting in the registry has set itself back to 0x00000000. A further restart stops the communication with the manager again, until I reset the IPv6 back to an FF value, and restart so on. I just can't figure this out. Any ideas why, the registry keeps switching the IPv6 value back to 0x00000000. Could there be something else which is interfering. I've switched auto updates off now as I wondered whether that might have been a culprit in resetting the network settings, but it's still doing this after the auto update has been switched off. PS I can't just switch out the router, that's another long (and boring) story.
  5. So I'm most of the way into this build now and discovered a few pitfalls. The main one being that finding a case that fits an SSI EEB motherbo has been both difficult and expensive. To be fair I had some very specific restrictions on the width of the tower as I have to fit the case into an area in my desk, but none the less I ended up using a Silverstone TJ09B, which was about £150. The other thing was the PSU which Jens used would not work with my Mobo without an extension lead. The CPUs individual power connections are quite far apart on the ASrock EP2C602 so I had to get an extension lead. I'm told the EVGA 750 gold PSU has individual outputs for multi CPUs so if I built again I'd go for one of those instead. So CPU £130 / Mobo £250 / PSU £80 / Case £150 / SSDs £160 / RAM £307 / £80 fans it's not been a cheap build!
  6. No, I mean V2.. http://ark.intel.com/products/75275/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2670-v2-25M-Cache-2_50-GHz I had considered the idea of using these chips for my whole rig, but there are significant cost savings to be had for me using the 6700Ks. I already have all my DDR3 ram, so I'm re-using this with the 6700s, with the XEONs I would have to upgrade all 6 of my PSUs, which would add further cost, I have 2U rack cases, so I would also potentially have cooling issues using dual xeons as well. Additionally, the chips and specifically the motherboards aren't readily available from reliable sources, so there is quite a gamble there, which I'm not prepared to take over my whole render farm. I'm thinking the 6700 will run cooler too than the Xeons and use less power, which is a concern when you have 6 of them next door to your bedroom running 24/7. I'm using this for my workstation as a bit of fun really.
  7. Well I've taken the plunge and ordered myself a couple of E5 2670 v2s off eBay £65 each. I was holding back because of the cost of the motherboards but a few new cheap ones have popped up in Germany £250, which I though was worth the gamble. I plan to be using this a my main workstation eventually as I'm in the process of building 6x 6700k systems for my render farm today. So I'll report back with some comparative speed tests.
  8. Should it work with version 2.5, or do I need to upgrade to 3.4? It always crashes the render server when I try and run it in CUDA, so have been using CPU rendering getting a bit fed up of how slow the CPU rendering is now though.
  9. I'm really interested in the possibilities of GPU rendering also. I currently have a GTX980 which I bought to use with Vray, however I disappointing to report that with 2.5 it doesn't seem to be supported with hardware rendering, unless I'm mistaken. So I'm yet to really see the performance benefit. With CPU rendering in RT, I find the view-port painfully slow,I'm still using an i5 2400 chip. But what I don't want to do is spend say £3k on upgrading a load of render nodes, only to discover that building a single mega multi GPU machine would have been a faster and easier option.
  10. Thanks for the detailed reply Jens, I think getting the right cooling for the processor is going to be the key to the success of this build. I need to find a fan that has good cooling performance, is compact and also quiet. I guess the holy grail of fans!! My rack cases are only 2U high, not dissimilar to this https://www.xcase.co.uk/2u-rackmount-server-cases/x-case-x255f-standard-atx-2u-550mm.html They currently have 3 fans pushing air across the board from the front, plus the CPU fan and the PSU fan. Individually they are not too noisy, but obviously this multiplies as all 6 are switched on. I was thinking something similar to the Dynatron R24 2U Active CPU Cooler, but I'm just not sure how well a 2u rack will cope with the heat of two processors.
  11. Jens, how has this build worked out for you in the end? I was contemplating doing the same, but I need to build 6! So I'm a bit nervous about using second hand discontinued chips. Also the mother boards for these seem not easy to get hold of. Did you manage to sort out your cooling issues? I'd be sticking these in rack units which are lower profile than the case you used so I'm a bit unsure about cooling as those big heat sink you used wouldn't fit.
  12. I'm comparing systems at the moment too. And trying to weigh up the difference between dual xeon systems and i7. My research is telling me that in spite of the savings from a dual mobo system (i.e. only one hard drive, OS, rack box, etc between two processors) the i7s are still more cost effective than the Xeons per processor cycle. I've been using CPU benchmark and Tom's Hardware to get an idea of performance differences. This cost difference gets compounded if you need around 6 Render servers as I do. The performance per price sweet spot seems to be the i7 6700K and i7 4790K chips at the moment, they'll get you 11k cycles for around £300 per proc, the next best seems to be the i7 5820K / i7 5930K, they are giving about 13K cycles for around £330-£480, but have the added downer of needing the upto date DDR4 RAM which is more expensive. (I already have 6 lots of 16Gb DDR3 I can re-use). Then at the top of the pricing seems to be the i7 5960K, which is giving around 16K cycles, but the proc is £875. It's a case of diminishing returns. The i7 5960K chip for instance cost almost 300% more than the i7 6700K, but only provides 50% more performance in simplistic terms. Or at least that's what I'm making of these numbers. Then there's the Xeons, an E5 2620 system, will give me 8k cycles each chip, so for two you're looking at 16K cycles at a cost of £700. But the dual motherboards alone are £300.
  13. Yes a good point, and something which I was considering as more infrastructure means more headaches. At the time the 2500 was a good bet for me regarding price performance and when you're buying 6 price matters right! I'll check out the 5820k thanks.
  14. Thanks for that, could the i7 5960 be used with something like this https://www.scan.co.uk/products/supermicro-mbd-x10dai-o-server-board-intel-c612-s-2011-3-x2-ddr4-sata-iii-6gb-s-pcie-30-gb-lan-e-atx it's the same socket, but the motherboard is marketed as a xeon proc? Also when you say overclock a great CPU are you referring to my current i5s or the i7 you sent the link to?
  15. Hi I have about 6 render nodes which I built myself about 24 months ago, all 2u racks with i5 2500 3.3Ghz chips with 16Gb ram. They're okay, and generally rendering a frame takes around 20-40 minutes. I have a client who is pushing me to turn around animations quicker, so I was wondering about perhaps adding a new machine to this stack to give myself a performance boost. I'm assuming performance has moved on again since I last purchased my renders nodes. I could probably spare about £1,500. I've often wanted to go with a dual core machines, but there always seems to be a hefty price premium for this, but I'd prefer to have less infrastructure to take care of. So I was wondering what might be good options with this budget. I reckon the case/psu would cost me about £130.
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