Vray Distributed Rendering Queue?

[Piolit]

Wondering if anyone knows of any way to queue up jobs on a single computer to be used in a distributed rendering network. Backburner w/ DR does not work. Is there any program that can queue up a job list to be used with DR? Appreciate any help I can get.

 

-Matt

[Parker1]

Why not just use BackBurner? PreCalculate your light cache and IR files and then send your jobs to BB as stripped renderings.

[Piolit]

That would just save me render time. The problem I'm having is that my renders are taking upwards of 20 hours on a single machine. So I set up a backburner queue to render overnight on the network with 5 jobs on five machines. When I get back the next morning, I have 5 renders that are 60% complete on each machine. If I had a distributed rendering queue, I could focus all the computers on one job at a time, thus if I got in and the renderings were not complete at least 3 out of the 5 would be.

 

 

 

Is there such a program/script that anyone has heard of?

 

Thanks,

Matt

[BrianKitts]

have you tried using the batch render panel? set everything up for your system to run a distributive render, but then send the job through the batch renderer instead of backbruner. I don't have distributive rendering setup right now (we haven't switched our farm up to 1.5 yet) to test if it'll work or not. but it's worth a shot

[Piolit]

I have not tried that yet, but thats a great idea. I'll let you know if it works. Seems to be a little more tedious though (than backburner) since I can only send jobs from 1 max file and probably need to save scene states for each camera (since I have different things hidden per view), but if it works it will be work it.

 

Thanks,

Matt

[Parker1]

Just vary the priority of each job start with 10, then 20, then 30, etc...BB will use all machines to finish the first job before it starts the second, then third, and so on.

[Piolit]

The batch render works! BKitts you are a genius. I've been trying to get this to work for the last 2 weeks straight. This will be great for DR multiple camera animation. Thank you both very much for your help.

 

-Matt

[ericbarlow21]

Hi BKitts and Piolit

 

I am having the same issue but I do not understand the solution which you have found... is there anyway you could please give a more detailed overview on how to accomplish this?

 

I am very new to backburner, Vray D.R., and have never even used batch render before...

 

Any tips or instructions would be more appriciated!

 

Thanks,

 

Eric

[BrianKitts]

you are trying to do two things at once which can't be done (AFAIK), you need to pick either option A or option B

 

option A would be to setup backburner on your render nodes. There's plenty of directions in the MAX help files to allow you to do this. Then when you render a job you just click the "net render" button and send off a job to the farm." your job gets rendered out on a single node allowing you to keep working on your own workstation. more nodes you have more frames you can run at once.

 

option B. If you want to use all of the render nodes simultaneously you would setup distributed render through vray on your local machine. check out how here..

http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150R1/distributed_rendering.htm

 

 

What I suggested before was using the batch render option in max (on the file menu under Rendering) to que jobs locally on your machine in order, and then possibly the distributed render would kick in so that all the nodes are helping on your current job. Like I said before that was a suggestion, but I've never tried it out personally. Seems like it would work. But this of course ties up your machine locally.

 

 

I'm not sure if you can use the "split scanlines" option in backburner with vray. I always just send out jobs on our farm, one image to one machine. That would be your only other option if it does work. Which would do what your after.....

[BrianKitts]

update: just ran a test, I guess you can strip render using vray.

 

So you need to get backburner and max installed on all your nodes, then once you can successfully send jobs to your nodes, use the split scanline option in backburner and all nodes will concentrate on one job at a time.

 

DR. is a different style beast which is also usefull, but in this case you don't need to use it.

[Piolit]

Batch Render with DR does work, although you can only set this up in one file (multiple views) and it does tie up your local machine. It worked great, but i started getting errors with really long/large renders where the IR took a while to calculate. I think its the same error you get when you cancel a DR job and quickly try to send another. The DR needs time to "reset" or clear the job. So I think what was happening was the batch render was trying to load the next render and calculate the IR in that scene but it had not been cleared from the DR yet , so it errored. Whereas backburner is good with restarting jobs (on another machine) when errored, batch render is not, so it would freeze at that error window, waiting for someone to click and close the error message.

 

So it works in theory but I wouldn't rely on it. I never tried it with precalculated IR.

 

Basically you need to set up the DR for your local machines, with however many nodes you have (see forums). Then set up batch render and add renders to que (use max help files).

 

I hope this helps, I am by no means any sort of Max, Vray expert, but this is what I have found from experience.

 

-Matt

[ShaunDon]

We render multiple large format images nightly across our farm, and we always strip render with backburner. We vary the number of strips depending on how intensive the job is, but there are many advantages to doing it this way. The only thing you need to do is calculate your lightcache first on one machine -- if you leave the LC to render with each strip, you see quite visible differences in value from one strip to the next when the render is recompiled.

 

Backburner will work through the files in sequence that they are submitted, and it will not begin strips for the next job until the strips for the previous job have been completed or at least assigned to other machines. This way if you come in and there are still two strips left to go, you can either leave those machines be while they finish, or suspend the job and only lost the time taken so far on those strips.

 

Best,

Shaun

[ericbarlow21]

Thanks Brian

 

We are going to run some tests on this tomorrow - I will let you know how they go!

 

The only reason I cannot use VRay D.R. is because it will also take up my workstation as well as the nodes and I am interested in keeping the workstation free to continue working on...

 

I like Backburner because I can send the job off to the nodes and continue working while the file renders but as we know it is tricky trying to figure out a way to make all nodes act as the do in D.R. and all focus on 1 single frame.

 

I will let you know how this all works tomorrow. I hope VRay makes D.R. and Backburner work together in this way sometime soon!

[sleepphase]

1.backburner is working but it uses one machine on the render farm , can't seem to get all the other machines to render one image at a time for an animation

 

 

2.i read the settings on spot3d, running distributed rendering on my local machine and the net render unchecked

but only my machine is rendering the other machines doesn't seem to help rendering. on the buckets only my computer are processing the render,

I am also new at this net rendering so i am trying to figure it out

the file is in the server thinking that the nodes might not have acccess to the file ....

 

any suggestions would be helpful