2 renders at once!

[jackdicker]

Ok guys,

 

Got a big job on with a very fast approaching deadline, im thinking I render these 2 interior jobs at the same time, will this reduce my render time? or does this depend on the power of my CPU? I have an i7k overclocked to 4.2ghz.

 

what do you guys think?

[RyderSK]

You can run it outside of your app (backburner, Deadline, etc...) and dedicate half of your cores to each, and you will get at best 50perc. performance for the multi-threaded parts of render,if you have enough ram to accomodate two renders.

 

But if time is really tight, you can just try Rebus.

[jackdicker]

thanks for the advice, ill see what rebus charge, just as a precaution.

[Devin Johnston]

I wouldn't recommend doing this for several reasons, it won't be any faster and Max could crash due to lack of resources.

[CJI]

Agree with Devin. Its not a good idea to run two at a time, not to mention Its pointless as it wont be any faster.

 

Word of warning, as good as render farms are, if you have not done it before be prepared to factor in upload time of all required assets as well as any redundancy for any problems. I got burned once on a very tight deadline where my computer just couldn't do it in time (at the time i couldn't figure out why, perhaps stress brain!) but when i uploaded to rebus it just rendered blank, there were no warnings but it just wouldn't render.

 

I much later discovered there was a problem with my scene (user error) as it shouldn't have been much of a problem even on my own machine but that was a very stressful two days. You live and learn, completely changed the way i work as result which can only be a good thing. Im not saying this will happen, just a heads up

[notamondayfan]

Following on from Curtis, automated render farms can be expensive, especially if you have to re-render. Perhaps try using farms that have people who you can speak to such as RenderNation or RenderNow, and they'll sort you out before any costly mistakes.

 

Dean

[TomD_Arch]

Jack,

Don't know if you are in an office with a network and a few other computers, but if so have you tried 'Distributed Bucket Rendering'? I had my IT guy install copies of max on co -workers computers and my render time reduced exponentially. It doesn't require additional licences and is idiot proof. I DID IT FOR CRY'IN OUT LOUD!

 

Good Luck! just reading this raised my own anxiety level for you!

[Scott Dombrowski]

DBR is usually great, but it's been getting a little flakey on me for large renderings (with mental ray, it'll hang at 100% and not save the image or spit out any render elements). I usually stick with DBR for the smaller test renders. For the finals, I've found using Backburner with the split scan lines option to be more reliable. It takes one image and splits it into however many strips you want and assigns each strip to a separate computer. It's very flexible, but it requires pre-computing the entire Final Gather pass one on computer, otherwise the lighting is inconsistent between strips. The nice thing about Backburner is that you can add and remove computers from the job during the render. I'll get my two render nodes started rendering an image while I use my main machine to continue working. When I'm finished, I'll add my machine to the Backburner pool. Or if I have a lot of renderings to do, I'll add my co-workers' machines to the pool as they go home for the night.

 

But yeah, I agree with the others, I don't think you'll see any benefit from working and rendering simultaneously on the same machine, or from trying to render two images at once on the same machine.

[Krisztian Gulyas]

I haven't tried it yet, so I don't know if that works good enough, but you could try rendering it in active shade mode with your GPU. If you have a good gpu and the scene is not too big, that could be an alternative.

 

EDIT: It should be faster than cpu rendering

Edited November 1, 2013 by krisztiangulyas

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Are you charging appropriate prices for your work? If so then you should be able to buy a second machine for rendering without any problems.

[avenjames]

I think if you are thinking your machine is not powerful enough for the tight deadline rendering, you could ask for a rendering service, faster and more soho.

[jackdicker]

Thank you so much for all your replies guys, means alot. I have another pc with an identical set up that is currrently being made as we speak. This isis mainly for my colleague to use but I would love the option to use his pc and my pc simultaneously for rendering, but I cant get my head round bucket distribution rendering, I use vray 1.49 on sketchup. Does anyone use this on this set up? What do I need and how do I go about understanding how it all works?

 

Again thank you for all the replies.

 

Jack