Need help fast please

[ZFact]

Hi;

We are currently working on a new animation project and running out of time. We thought our 8core machine could manage the processing on its own... but sadly it is not.

 

We are using max and vray and want to utilize back burner and use the other 2 quad core machines in the office to help calculate the irradiance map... can someone give me a brief step by step guide on how to do this correctly... we need help from installing back burner to setting up the correct settings within vray etc... as this is somethign none of us here have done before.

 

Thanks for any help

P

[Dave Buchhofer]

Just install max on all the related machines you want to use, make sure they all have the same plugins installed, then start Backburners Manager.exe on one machine, and Backburners Server.exe on all the others.

[ZFact]

Can you calculate the irradiance map using DR.... i read somewhere that you can get white seams once compiled together at the end... is this true?

[manta]

I think its best to calculate the IRR map on one machine for consistent results...

[ZFact]

what can i do to speed things up... i have 2 quad cores and an 8 core at my disposal... it doesnt make sense to only use the 8 core for calculating the IRR map...

[BrianKitts]

How long is your irr taking?

[ZFact]

Hi;

Ok I decided to not distribute render the irr map. But now I want to distribute the final frames - loading in the Irr map from file... but the

slaves are not reading the file... can anyone help please.

 

Thanks

P

[RobNJ73]

Where is your Irr map saved? Is it in a networked location where all the boxes can get at it, or is it saved locally on the PC you used to calculate the map?

[ZFact]

Hi Robert;

Thanks for your query... I have now stored the irr map on the networked

slave machine and the server is now picking it up for all buckets... the problem I am having now is that i want to distribute out to multiple machines... how do i setup paths to multiple machines... i can only seem to setup the one network path for materials within the assets manager... any help would be great.

 

Thanks

[BrianKitts]

All your materials/maps/irr data, need to be in one central location. Most likely a server or shared folder on the network. All machines need to contain a mapped drive to that location. then you just map everything to that "drive"

[Scott Dombrowski]

I'm posting this as a "just in case you haven't run into this yet"... While doing a Backburner job last week, I found that I needed to reference the networked location of my assets (texture images, saved FG map, etc.) in the UNC format. Instead of telling my floor material that the texture was on "N:\Project\sceneassets\images", I had to tell it to look at "\\server1\project\sceneassets\images". You can get the UNC path name by going through My Network Places\Microsoft Windows Network on XP.

 

I don't have much runtime on Backburner, so YMMV, but it was something I needed to tweak to get my scene assets viewable by my other render nodes.

 

Good luck!

[BrianKitts]

You can get the UNC path name by going through My Network Places\Microsoft Windows Network on XP.

 

The other route would be to go into max's asset tracker and in the file menu under "paths" and select "resolve path to UNC Location"

[Matt Sugden]

if you're in a serious rush I'd sack off setting up back burner for now.

 

split your anim up into big chunks of frames, archive your complete project so you have all the files referenced in one place, copy these files to each machine then run the render from the individual machines, loading the irr map into the project.

 

believe me you don't want to be worrying about back burner if you haven't got time to waste trying to figure it out, it can be a can of worms, (missing files, file permissions etc) and best tackled when your not dealing with critical deadlines.