Project Folder, UNC, Backburner and DR

[danb4026]

I use didtruibuted rendering or backburner most of the time. I was using UNC over my home office network with the files on my host computer's hard drive and the other computers accessing that drive to locate the files. I found my renderings to be unusually slow.

 

I decided to try something else which helped out alot. I partitioned my drives on each of my 3 computers and gave those partitions the same drive letter "M". I then created a Project Folder on each machine with the same paths (M:\project folder\project name\sub-folders). Now each computer accesses the files on its own hard drive rather than thru the network. Upside - Speed; Downside - copying files, especially bitmaps and materials, to each computer.

 

Question: Is there a way for a chosen bitmap or anything used in the material editor for that matter, to be automatically copied and placed into the project folder and the path updated accordingly?

 

This would save alot of time..perhaps there's a script??

[mikedanchalski]

I used to copy maps to each render slave with a batch file. Then I used a little utility called Second Copy that can automatically copy files to multiple different locations. As far as updating the path on the material, no way I know of except to strip the path with Bitmap/photometric editor, that way on the other machine it will redirect to the local map cache.

 

Mike