Sharing maps for distributed rendering

[Three D]

Hi. I've just setup Vray distributed rendering for the first time using a number of workstations on our network as render slaves. The DR rendering is working fine but I'm looking for some advice on where to store and share my texture maps. Originally I stored them on our main server but this was painfully slow loading the maps on my own workstation so now I store all the maps on my own workstation in a folder which I share to all the render slaves. Would this be the best configuration or is there a btter way? Thanks for any advice.

[Tommy L]

I would think long-term if I were you. You already mentioed what the problem is, you have a slow network. Identify why, then fix it. Keep all your materials, working files, bitmaps, everything on the central server. Whenever you need to format your machine or ammend the farm or anything in the future, you'll be happy you did. And you should have another machine that backs up the server nightly.

[Three D]

Thanks Tommy L. I didn't think our network was particularly slow to be honest. We primarily use AutoCAD and large drawings work fine but when I open my material editor in 3ds Max and up to 18 slots have to load large texture files from our server, 20-40mb PNG's/JPEG's and 70mb Hyperfocal HDRI's for example, it becomes unworkable. Perhaps using such high-res files is nuts particularly since I only use the high-res files simply because I have them, but they always worked fine when loaded from my workstation and not from our server.

[Dave Buchhofer]

We do two ways.. but tommy is right, you can get burned pretty easy with the local saving if you're not especially vigilant about post project cleanup and archiving.

 

Most jobs: Textures on network server, on same switch as the farm, also doubles as our 'working' project directory. library of standard textures.. a sub-library in each project for possible custom textures

 

that works good.. for things with an excessive number of textures, or size, we also have a little C:\Textures\ rig on every machine. in here goes large librarys of stuff.. IE: RPC crap, HDR, People textures, Car textures.. crap that gets used metric shit ton in most projects. this is mirrored across all machines as a resources dir.

 

theres also a subdir in textures that can be mirrored by triggering a batch file that'll do a copy of updated files around..

 

set targetnodes=render1 render2 render3 render4 render5 workstation1 workstation2 workstation3 workstation4 workstation5

for %%A in (%targetnodes%) do @ xcopy /s /y C:\textures\*.* "\\%%A\C$\textures"
pause

 

if you're feeling frisky you could easily rig up a maxscript file that triggers that by using 'shelllaunch' or 'hiddendoscommand' (for you to search up in the maxscript help.)

 

Aaaand renders done.. hf~

[Three D]

Thanks for that Dave. I'll mess around with a few different setups to see which works best.