new job, new skills needed... PLz, help me about BB and DR !

[rikou]

Hi,

I'm a newbie with backburner/DR... Before, I worked in office and I never used it (If I needed to render more than one still image, I made a ressource collector, sent it to a another machine and then render (with saved IR+LC, saved image...).

Now, I leaved this job and I'm currently freelance... So that's why I have to learn to deal with BB/DR. I have 2 pc for that moment but I hope to have 2 more in a few month...

What I'm looking for is to be able to send my jobs at the end of my day to render during the night. Then the next morning, I will be happy to see all my stills images with all my IR saved, LC saved etc etc

An important point is that I don't want to have to precal' IR or LC before sending job cause it will be a non sense if I have to wait for a long time before to be able to render my job ! So what I understand is :

JOB 1 => precalculated IR and LC

JOB 2 => render (from IR and LC) image.

Is it correct ?

I would like to know what is the best way to do this ?

 

After I said that, I think about my futur "little renderfarm" (!). I will certainly have 4 differents pc config., is this a problem if I want to use DR ?

 

Sorry to be so long and boring and sorry for my bad english !

Thanks a lot

[Devin Johnston]

First DR and Backburner are two different things, you probably know the difference but I just wanted to clarify that. If your going to use BB with the render strips option to render out still's you have to save out you IR&LC prior to rendering the final image. The reason why is if you don't each machine will calculate a little different lighting solution and when the strips are put together each one will be a little different and you'll have these horizontal lines running through your image.

 

As for DR you can use up to 10 computers so your good there.

[rikou]

thx Maxer !

more precisions... I don't want to use render strips

I render essentially stills images (min. 4000px) so I also want to optimize my precal' for LC and IRmap. My thoughts are to use my worstation as Manager and Serveur via BB and DR (to use other pc's ressource).

1 - lightcache computed locally on my workstation, and saved in a file

2 - Then through DR, my workstation and the slaves starts immediatly from lightcache (step 1) the second pass : IRmap

3 - And finally, when IRmap is computed and saved, my workstation and the slaves start my render "from file" with IRmap and LC

It is what I would be able to do... Does it make sense ? Is it a good way ?

Of course, I presume IRmap can be computed via DR but I'm not really .. Is it true ?

 

Now why I want to use BB is to queue several renders from several scenes all over the night ... so that's my goal ! Use DR to render and use BB to queue several renders...

 

Thanks again

[rikou]

no answer ?

No one have any experience to share ?

[Devin Johnston]

Rikou I don't think you understand how DR and BB are supposed to work, DR is mostly used to assist you in your work flow which means you use other computers to help you render out test renderings while you are working. When you are ready to render out the final image you could use BB in two ways to either give each computer a single rendering to render by it's self, or use all the computers to help render one image by automatically splitting it into strips. You don't have to pre calculate the IR&LC if your just letting one computer render the scene but if you have several computers you will be missing out on the speed advantage you can get by letting your network cooperate on rendering a single image. You can calculate the LC&IR maps either locally or over the network using BB.

[rikou]

ok Thx Maxer ...

I think my bad english deserve me !

You're right, I'm agree with you but I want to know how to use DR and BB... Why ? because I read with SP4"it is now possible to submit DR servers list for DR through backburner stuff"

In fact, you could used DR and BB together... BB is used to queue diffrent jobs and DR is used to benefit from all available processors...

I will try to find more advices...

Thank you

[notamondayfan]

You can use DR with BB, so you can render one image on multiple computers, without strip rendering. As you mentioned, its quite new, so probably not documented too much.

 

Anyway simply setup BB so that you have the manager on render slave, vray spawner installed on all machines, and have BB server running on a render slave (could be the same machine that hosts the manager). When you send a job, enable "Distributed Rendering" in vray, in the settings check all the IPs are there and ticked, and enable "Net Render" to submit the job to your BB manager.

You should see the machine with the server load the scene, and render the image, with extra buckets from the other machines.

 

Deano!

[Tommy L]

well yes, but the processors will be picked up by a network machine and its own BB. So the nodes will hold easch other up. It doesnt quite work how it should, I wouldnt recommend it. Ive used by accident a couple of times, it can result kin unknown processor errors on machines which cannot allocate processor resoureces to two places at the same time, but try anyway and confuse themselves. Do strip OR distributed rendering. Not both at the same time.

 

Edit: unless you use less strips than you have machines. But I dont know why you'd do that.

[notamondayfan]

I wasnt saying use strip renders with distributed rendering, just use net rendering with distributed rendering. Not had any major problems as yet.

[Tommy L]

Aha, my mistake.