Network Rendering

[dande]

I do a lot of network rendering using backburner and I have always wondered why a frame rendered in backburner takes longer then the same frame rendering from inside max. so if I render 100 frames from inside max it will render much quicker then if I render the same frames using backburner. I am using Mental Ray as my renderer.

 

When rendering with backburner after a few frames the rendering of each frame takes longer and longer. Which made me think there must be some sort of memory leak in Mental Ray. But if there was a memory leak in mental ray why does'nt it effect rendering from inside max.

 

So this week I decided to try a 3rd party render. I downloaded RenderPal. This product I found more moody then Backburner to set up and I still could'nt get it to render on every node even though all the nodes are identical. It took 4 times the length of time to render each frame.

 

So back to Back Burner. Just wondering if anybody else has come across these issues and if anybody has found a solution. Even if it is a third party solution

[Devin Johnston]

It has a lot to do with the speed of your network and how you have it set up. If your server is slow or if it's not running a server grade OS then it's probably bottlenecking there.

[Scott Schroeder]

If you have a small farm, you'll want to enable job grouping, task blocks, or whatever they call it. I can't remember. It essentially sends blocks of tasks to each box. Rather than render one frame, unload the file, re-load the exact same file, render, unload, etc etc, it sends a block of "x" number of frames to render so the file stays loaded on the machine.

 

To compare speed form backburner to native Max, you have to compare the very first time you render in Max. Everything after that, a lot of your textures are still loaded in memory and it possibly renders faster.

[neilmanisharma]

i was given job in my office to setup a small render farm of 5 pc's with backburner and 3ds max, though i survey alot and since 8months i have been doing network rendering & during that time many times i needed file to render out fast and i was confused and eager to know how can i make render time faster and from my exp. il tell you some of points that i feel

 

loading textures from network-makes render slow,what i did i made a texture lib in all my servers-c drive so when evenever max renders out it will go for its own c,to UNC paths needed this will help u alot,loading unloading heavy textures will make ur render slow

 

get a fast LAN -this will send recevie jobs faster

 

A SSD-it will boost pc read write files lot faster

 

disable bitmap paging in 3ds max.

[Devin Johnston]

loading textures from network-makes render slow.

It's only going to be slow for the initial load, after that everything's in memory. Doing it this way can cause problems if one or more of your nodes is missing new maps and doesn't get updated.