DR buckets - hyperthreading?

[mfured20]

hey guys, i just set up DR on my network for the first time [first time use of max 9, with RC3]. i went thru all the tutorials, and its working [even if it did take a couple minutes for the slave processors to kick in].

 

my issue is that i only have one bucket for each of my render nodes. those computers are Core 2 Duos, so i would think that i would have multiple buckets for each machine. however, i have two for the main computer and only one for each of the other two.

 

is there some trick im missing, like hyperthreading- or multithreading, whichever you prefer..?

 

thanks guys!

[mfured20]

follow up - i found the answer on chaos forums, i will repost it here for giggles -

 

 

 

"There was a thread about this, basically for some reason 3dsmax 9 ignores the Multithreading option when started in DR slave mode.

 

We've worked around this for newer builds, but for the time being, you can force V-Ray to use a certain number of threads by opening the MaxScript listener (F11) and typing:

 

renderers.current.system_numThreads=N

 

where N is the number of buckets you want (basically the same as the number of processors).

 

Best regards,

Vlado"

[kippu]

matt , did you face any problems running vrayspawner on max 9 , if so how did you overcome that?

[Koper]

thanx, thats a gr8 script

 

do you know if it is possible to assign 8 bucket and have 4 of them working just on reflect/refract areas or something, basically assigning buckets to certain areas?

[mfured20]

hey guys.

 

i actually havent gotten my DR to work properly yet, i ran out of time before this last deadline and i had to switch over to backburner.

 

as far as issues, i didnt have any big problems with vrayspawner, it opened and stayed open. my slave machines pinged back to my workstation and helped on the render with more buckets. however i seem to have issues with my networking, since some of my buckets came back with different colors [see attatched].

 

i suppose that, although i know i have my maps in a network accessible drive, one of my machines cant see it. i know what i need to fix today...

 

as for assigning buckets to do only certain aspects of the rendering, like just reflection in a certain area, i have no idea. i have actually just finished my first project as a freelancer straight out of schoo, and only came upon that max script by accident.

 

oh, with regards to that script, be careful with it, i somehow managed to force six buckets from each of my three machines, so i had a total of 18 buckets in my rendering window. not sure what i did, but i obviously applied the script wrong.

[gfa2]

I've had that problem with stray buckets getting rendered with different lightness/darkness and the only way I could solve it was precalculating the light (IR and LC) then copy that file to each DR computer and then do the rendering. I usually only have that problem when I'm doing hi-res output though.

[Tommy L]

Yes, the light has to be pre-calculated as it is a floating point calculation. The machines will come up with different solutions. Yours seem to vary more wildly than they should though.

[mfured20]

im in the process of precalculating my irr and lc as we speak, on one computer. ill let you guys know how it goes.

[gfa2]

Yes, the light has to be pre-calculated as it is a floating point calculation. The machines will come up with different solutions. Yours seem to vary more wildly than they should though.

 

I'm not so sure about that Tommy. I use DR all the time on lower res images without precalculating the light and it looks flawless. It's just when I render it at high-res that it seems to need to be pre calc'ed.