distributed/ network rendering

[marius e]

I have never had any great luck with distributed rendering....pc's always seem to fail. Why is that? Also happened when I use to work in an office environment...when using another node of similar spec the machine would eventually drop. Im no network genius and have never used backburner, have never had the need for it really, but would in due course.

 

So just want to know for such an easy access as distributed rendering in mental ray, why would it not work properly, is it me or have you also encountered that?

[Scott Dombrowski]

DBR with mental ray has always been flaky for me. Sometimes it works great, other times, the render gets to 100% and then just hangs without fully completing. When it does that, I'm able to save out the image from the frame buffer, but it won't generate any render elements and I have to kill the Max process in the task manager. I haven't discovered a consistent use case where it will always fail, so I'm not sure what's causing the problem. To get around it, I use backburner with the split scan line option turned on, which splits the image into however many pieces you specify and hands those out to the other render nodes. The catch there is that you have to precompute your final gather pass first on one machine then freeze it, otherwise you'll get inconsistent lighting from one strip to the next. Split scan lines is faster than rendering only on one computer, but it's not as easy to set up as DBR, which is a shame. It's also more stable because if one of your render nodes goes down, it doesn't trash your whole render like it would with DBR.

[Morne Erasmus]

I'm not sure why your pc's are dropping the render in mentalray but I would say

+1 for BackBurner as Scott suggested.

 

Backburner has its own pros and cons but works pretty well in general

Another option you can look at is Deadline which is MUCH better than BackBurner. There is a free version that will work up to 2 extra nodes. It's a bit more tricky to setup than backburner if you're not into IT however. Cool thing about Deadline is that it has its own app so you can check and manage the render jobs right on your cellphone.

 

With backburner on the other hand it also has a web interface.

 

The easiest solution for you I think will be Backburner.

Then also, get yourself a remote desktop app like logmein, teamviewer, or splashtop. You get different ones some free, some for a small fee. But these can be a LIFESAVER if you are away from the office and need to check on things

 

Good Luck, hope that helps