Am I asking too much with different versions Distributing my Vray Render?

[bigchrisrowland]

Hi Guys, I'm a newbie to network rendering & distribution rendering. I have worked alone for many years using 3DS Max & Vray, never really rendering anything more than 10-30 hours.

 

Recently I joined a company with 5 people all using 3D Max & Vray.

No-one in this company knows about distributed rendering or network rendering. I have used network rendering before to queue jobs over a weekend but I have never had a network of PC's to use for distributed rendering. I have been trying, using all the information on the net and with a little success. The only problem I find, is after I have clicked the distribute render button in vray and I've added the servers I want to use, It's not obvious until the render starts to render (after all the pre-processes) the image if these servers are going to help with the render. The 3 computers I have setup dist. rendering on.

 

1 is a dual core pentium, running windows 7 and max 2009 (64)

1 is a 4 core hyperthreading i7 920 running windows xp 64 & ax 2009 (64)

1 is my laptop that is running windows vista ultimate (32) Max 2009 (64)

 

This occasionally works fine... but I really can't trust it to distribute render 4 jobs over the weekend as network renders. Sometimes all the computers work (usually the first job), and sometimes my poor laptop seems to be rendering 1 job all weekend with no help from other machines. Is there something I have overlooked?

 

Am I trying the impossible with 3 different windows versions?

Any tips would be greatly appreciated... many thanks

Christian

[BrianKitts]

No you shouldn't be having any problems switching between those versions. There is no difference between a max file made in 64bit vs. 32bit.... the difference is in how the software handles the file. Same goes for vray as long as you have the same version on each of the systems you should be fine.

 

That being said you can force the number of buckets by executing the following maxscript in the listener.

 

renderers.current.system_numThreads=8

 

the number at the end would change based on the number of cores in the system you are on.

 

There used to be a bug in vray that required you to use that script sometimes if it wasn't using all the buckets.....but that got fixed a while ago.

[montecarlomethod]

go to the chaosgroup forums. there are way more threads on this there but...what version of vray are you running? are you sending a job to distribute render on backburner? you should try simple tests with no GI and large buckets to see what's going on with the render nodes from the workstation with the vray license dongle. if the servers are set to restatt on render end give it like 30secs before hitting render again!

Don't try calculating the LC on all of them. they're all different speeds and some might not even finish calculating. again too many variables. visit chaosgroup forums

[ihabkal]

probaby slow network too, 100 not gigabit. it affects DR a lot when sending large scenes to the othe rcomputers...