Tim Saunders Posted November 30, 2005 Share Posted November 30, 2005 i know vray advanced and viz 2005 have some issues. after following the advice given to others on the chaos forums i took the steps mentioned there about replacing the vray dummy files with backburner files and re-naming them. after doing that i ran the vray spawner and got any error and it automatically shut down the vray spawner. my question is however, is there any reason i can't just use backburner with vray? i'm tired of this crap. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ShaunDon Posted November 30, 2005 Share Posted November 30, 2005 Hey Tim. I've pretty much given up on V-Ray's DR until the apocryphal release of 1.5. For those who don't know, the distributive rendering controls were gutted in 1.4x for a total overhaul, only we've seen hide nor hair of the new version for what, going on 19 months? As it exists now DR is more of a hindrance as the spawners crash every other time they're engaged. Anyway to answer your question, Backburner has been my saving grace in the past year. I distribute the rendering of all my stills now with Backburner's striping. Most of my work is using QMC for indirect light, so I just hit the render button, but if you use the light cache you'll want to precalc it on a single machine and then load the saved map when you send to Backburner. If you're using the irradiance map for first bounce, you'll probably want to precalc that too, but it's time-consuming. The precalc'ing is to avoid seams when the stripes are compiled into a final image caused by variations in the indirect light from one stripe to the next. Hope this helps! Shaun Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Saunders Posted November 30, 2005 Author Share Posted November 30, 2005 thanks shaun. in your comment about precalc to avoid seams when compiling, i take it you don't have this problem when using qmc secondary? i guess if backburner works with vray, i'm just trying to figure out the benefit of vray's dr (even when it does work) over backburner. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Saunders Posted November 30, 2005 Author Share Posted November 30, 2005 wait and another thing, do you use qmc for both bounces? do you get good render times? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gfa2 Posted November 30, 2005 Share Posted November 30, 2005 Hey guys...I've been using Vray's DR for awhile now and I love it. I've used it on VIZ 2005, max 7 and max 8. I've only got 1 license of Vray so I can only use 10 PC's but they all have Hyper threading so I get 20 buckets rendering at the same time (man is that cool to see). I use a free program called PStools to start and stop the other 9 DR computers. I created some batch files that use PStools so I don't have to wonder around my office messing around with the other computers. The only real problems that I've had with DR is that I can't get the DR computers to read the imagemaps off of the network so I have to copy them local to each PC (batch files again, but it's kind of a pain). And on really large renderings (over 4k pixels wide) some of the buckets render darker than others...seems like a memory resource problem with Vray. If you have any specific problems let me know and I might be able to help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Cassil Posted November 30, 2005 Share Posted November 30, 2005 What!? You mean there is something that works better in FR than Vray? Woo-Hoo! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Saunders Posted November 30, 2005 Author Share Posted November 30, 2005 I use a free program called PStools to start and stop the other 9 DR computers. I created some batch files that use PStools so I don't have to wonder around my office messing around with the other computers. The only real problems that I've had with DR is that I can't get the DR computers to read the imagemaps off of the network so I have to copy them local to each PC (batch files again, but it's kind of a pain). QUOTE] interesting gary, so what was your trick in getting vray's dr to work so easily with viz05? did you follow those steps mentioned on the chaos forums? i tried that, but like i said earlier, after i replaced the vray dummy file into my viz root dir with one i made from running backburner. i engaged the spawner, and it instantly diplayed an error and said it was shutting down. i guess my main reason for this thread, however is to get a response from others who have tried both spawner and backburner with vray. and what i am gaining or missing by going either way. after the 15 minutes i had this afternoon to experiment with bb i figure if that works why not go with it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kippu Posted November 30, 2005 Share Posted November 30, 2005 Gary regarding the other computers not being able to read the imagemaps ... have you specifically mapped the shared drives on the client computers with the same drive name ..... like G: in server should be G: in the client... it worked for me Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesTaylor Posted November 30, 2005 Share Posted November 30, 2005 Tim, i know its a pain to set up, but i had DR working fine on viz2005 and was very stable. I would suggest looking thro some of the forums such as chaosgroup for a detailed explanation of how to set it up, even set up Backburner and create your own vraydummy files. Backburner is also very useful, but not as useful as DR on single images. Backburner is more suitable for animations and however you render, if your using GI and rendering across a farm you will need to precalc the irr map / light map to avoid frame flickering. if your just using a single machine you don't need to but i'd still suggest it as it should save you time. Finally i generally use irr map for primary bounce and qmc for secondary bounces. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesTaylor Posted November 30, 2005 Share Posted November 30, 2005 gary, as mention by Kippu, mapping your networked drives properly and consistently across each machine node should remove the need to copy maps to each local machine, alternatively you could use unc paths but that may be more harssle on a large scene. The buckets that render darker when using DR shouldn't happen, i've suffered this previously and it turned out i had different version of vray installed on different machines.....could this be your problem? After making sure i had the same version across all machines its never been a problem. James Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thablanch Posted November 30, 2005 Share Posted November 30, 2005 DR is great in sometimes only.. We do have a couple machines, and usually, it is faster to run 6 images on 6 machines than getting 6 different DR for thoses same 6 images. The only time we do use it is when you need the image now ( or yesterday) DR can have a hard time finding paths ( we do make sure that we are using \\ map instead of R\ DR can mess up your scene if you do use interpolated materials So, I would say that 95% of the time, Backburner is th way to go, And, for your first question, there is no reason to not use Backburner with Vray For the bounces, Irr Map for first and LightCache for second,(fastest method) QMC is just way too slow, unless you do animation moving stuff, where QMC as first bounce can be a great option. Lightcache is sooooo fast. For really quick previews, LC for both bounces, low AA, mid lightcache subdivisions, shows you the light really well, ( do I sound like someone that really likes lightcache??) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gfa2 Posted November 30, 2005 Share Posted November 30, 2005 As far as the image maps go, with the PStools software the DR computers don't even need to be logged in for me to use them (my network guy loves that) but that means there are no network drives mapped. I've also tried the unc file structure but that doesn't seem to work either. So I'll just keep doing what I've been doing...it works for now. To answer the real question of this post...even though I have about 50 good P4 computers on my renderfarm I find myself using DR over backburner with the stripes. It's just really nice to see the image evolve on your screen, if you see something you don't like you can cancel in the middle, make a change and hit render again. With backburner, you have several steps before you are rendering and then you really only see it once it's all done. BUT one really nice thing about backburner is that you can exclude your own PC from the render job, freeing up your PC to work on other things...can't do that with DR. BUT for DR, if your PC has hyper threading or 2 real processors, you can assign 1 processor to work on max/VIZ stuff and exclude the other processor from max/VIZ then you can get some work done while you are rendering (even if it's just checking email or CGarchitect.com). Vray seems to really suck all the power out of your computer...which is a good thing, unless you want to do 2 things at 1 time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Saunders Posted November 30, 2005 Author Share Posted November 30, 2005 alright. i re-installed vray and the tweeked backburner files on the render server (i am starting with one until i figure it out) and i guess i must have done or spelled something wrong in my first 20 attempts of doing this thing. the image rendered fine without any warnings in the vray messages window. normally it tells me the render host failed. but i compared the render speed without dr and the render time was the same. any thoughts on why? it was just a small image 640x480, could that have anything to do with it? maybe i don't notice until i render larger images? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Saunders Posted November 30, 2005 Author Share Posted November 30, 2005 seems like i'm getting close, but heres a test render of another scene. anyone had this problem? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gfa2 Posted November 30, 2005 Share Posted November 30, 2005 looks like the DR computer isn't seeing the imagemaps in the scene. Use the resource collector to gather all the maps (rescouce collector won't grab the environemt backround map ) then copy those maps to the VIZ/max maps directory on the DR computer. And yes...the render time will go way down as you add more computers. sometimes it takes a while for the DR computers to kick in so that's why the top would be normal, then the DR kicks in and doesn't know where to get that grass map. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Saunders Posted November 30, 2005 Author Share Posted November 30, 2005 boy thats a crap load of textures to load locally on each machine. i thought all i had to do was include the path to the maps in the 3dsviz file? i also notice in the squares where the slave renders, it renders lighter. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Saunders Posted November 30, 2005 Author Share Posted November 30, 2005 ooh yeah baby! i figured ot out. it was because the site was xref'edinto the scene. for some reason the slave wasn't reading the site which makes sense on why the squares it rendered were lighter, it wasn't able to calculate the gi on something that wasn't there, it just rendered back ground. as soon as i merged the site it was smooth sailing (i just knocked on wood). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesTaylor Posted November 30, 2005 Share Posted November 30, 2005 Tim, looks like you've got DR running in essence! like gary says would appear your slave machines aren't seeing the textures, refer to my earlier post (bottom of previous page). it explains you need to map the drive containing maps across each machine being used. should work fine when you achieve this - certainly does for me anyway! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Saunders Posted November 30, 2005 Author Share Posted November 30, 2005 thanks james. the slave IS getting the maps. i have them on a shared drive and i did put the path in the 3dsviz file locally, so i didn't copy the actual textures locally like gary said. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gfa2 Posted November 30, 2005 Share Posted November 30, 2005 I cannot for the life of me get the imagemaps to read off of the network...but then again my DR computers aren't even logged in so I'm assuming that is the problem. Do you guys have your DR computers logged in where the network drives have been assigned? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Saunders Posted November 30, 2005 Author Share Posted November 30, 2005 yes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now