VRay Distributed Rendering - Missing Maps

[emesjayjohn]

So i tried setting up Distributed Rendering with VRay today with a spare workstation at home, and hit render. They see each other and they both render except the buckets for the slave-pc are black/darker(From memory, the reflection pass is the only one that renders?).

 

I browsed through some online forums and they say you must create a folder called Maps on your C:/ of your slave computer and copy your textures in there, but that didn't do anything. Read the VRay DR manual and that said to put the textures in the bitmap directory... Im a bit lost as to were that is, if anyone is kind enough to help.

 

Also with all the reading about DR, i hear some people say, instead of working locally on your main workstation, you should be having all your assets/files on a NAS/server for easier workflow. Are there any drawbacks as my concern would be read/write speeds with multiple 4-8k textures.

 

Thanks!

MJ

Edited February 21, 2015 by emesjayjohn

[simonjager]

Easy solution would be to convert all your bitmap paths (also IES/HDRI/Proxy/Xref) to UNC (network path)

 

You could also copy all your files from your workstation to the exact same location on your slave (requires sync if you change something)

 

NAS/server is also an option but might require a gigabit network and for example SSD's if you have those in your workstation and are afraid of speed loss. Also in this case you need your paths to be UNC.

 

Try UNC first, if that doesn't work there could be permission problems.

 

Good luck.

[emesjayjohn]

Managed to get it to work by copying it into the same location. Tried UNC but having a bit of troubles with permission issues which ill try sort out but other than that, everything works well. Renders have been halved by 50% which is awesome. Another problem came up were the slave kept timing out, but managed to solve it with turning firewall off with the slave node.

 

I will eventually invest in a NAS though, just for some redundancy i guess...

 

Thanks for the help Simon.

Edited February 22, 2015 by emesjayjohn

[frog_a_lot]

Try pressing the button "Include missing maps" or whatever it is in the DR settings.

Should transfer all your assets and maps to other computer

[emesjayjohn]

Will do, Cheers...

[inatosema]

does anyone know if there's a script available that automatically updates all your render node directories? instead of manually updating each node exterior links to a UNC?