Distibuted Rendering Problems

[Michael Pickard]

Hi there

 

I'm currently working on a scene which is a walk through animation. The scene is quite large and the times it's taking to render each frame on one computer was taking to long.

The scene also has forest objects in it

 

So I've set up distributed rendering but am having a few issues. I believe its due to Ram issues.

 

My master computer has 32gb of Ram

My slave computer has 16gb of Ram

 

The problem is the slave doesn't kick into help with rendering until the master computer is 3/4 of the way through rendering the frame or the slave computer just crashes.

Does anyone know how i can get around this? I have read somewhere that the slave should be the one with more RAM but not sure how true this is?

 

Thanks in advance

[James Vella]

Sounds correct to me, check what the scene is using in Ram if its more than 16gb then definately is the case. It has to unload all the stuff into ram onto the hard drive if it does not have enough and then begin the render. This can take quite some time as hdd is not nearly as fast as Ram.

[Michael Pickard]

So is there anyway round it? For example if i use the 16gb computer as the master would that help?

[James Vella]

If the scene is using more than 16gb then it wont make a difference.

 

Your best bet is to upgrade the hardware to have the same amount of ram.

 

The next best thing you can do if you cannot upgrade the ram for whatever reason is to optimise the scene so its using less than 16gb. Best quick ways are:

 

- Reduce texture size - look through all your textures being used in the scene, if it doesn't need to be 4K for example, reduce it to 2k or 1k. Theres some scripts around that do this.

- Reduce HDRI size - if its a 8k HDRI u can reduce this to 4k or something just check ur reflections to ensure its not too low if you are using it for this, generally lighting wont take a big hit from this.

- Proxy and instance where u can

 

If all else fails and you are still over your limit I would keep net render on but disable DR. This way you can allocate the frames/scenes that consume the least amount of ram to that machine. It will take longer to render each frame however it will be doing its part in producing a few extra frames that will help in the long run.

 

One caveat to be aware of is that if its consuming too much ram than that machine can handle you are exposing yourself to crashes, I would rather lose a few frames due to the above method than random frames here and there because the DR kicked in late and crashed it.

Edited August 20, 2018 by redvella