Remote Desktop solutions for 3DSMax

[Tom Bussey]

Another winter - another lockdown means that I'm going back to work from home for what will probably be a couple of months. Here in Wales we can actually get fined for going to work as employees so no matter your views on the transmisability of Coronavirus that's probvably a decent reason.

Anyway, I'm in the fortunate (depending on your viewpoint) situation of living right next door to my work, so I should be sorting out a direct connection to the work LAN in the coming weeks. One of my biggest frustrations over the recent months has been trying to use a remote connection over VPN. Our official solution is LogMeIn client, but I find that horribly laggy. VPN & RDP is slightly better, but the responsiveness is still not all there and occasionally it just craps out, so productivity goes down and stress levels go up.

I'm hoping that the LAN connection sorts things out to a large extent, but beyond that I'm looking for other suggestions for remote desktop solutions.

• Windows RDP
• VNC
• Parsec (seems to be aimed at gamers, just tried it out and lag seems better than windows remote/VPN even over the internet)
• Moonlight (Nvidea tech, sounds like it can utilise LAN)

I have a Quadro P4000 GPU, apparently this can be used to power windows RDP, but I can't find anything about it in settings, not sure if it just does it by default.

[Francisco Penaloza]

I believe this been talk on this forum, but I am not sure if it came out in other conversation or it was a similar question.

Any ways I will rely here because even though we have a solution to this remote working, we are wondering if there can be something better.

Our solution so far it been only using sinc tools instead of remote to our 'Office computers'

We are using Resilio Sinc, it is based on bit Torent technology. So the three artist have an external USB drive(soon to be NAS) with all our assets and working projects.

Any change that any of us does, it gets replicated to our office server and the rest of the team.  Each of us has a decent computer at home and so far it bee working fine.

The caveat is the price. we got a good deal, but if we scale it will go more expensive that we can afford, Also every time a new projects come up We all have to sinc to this new folder, is not hard but it gets confusing sometimes, when I am not working on a project that some else is working, then I need a file from them, and so on. Also since we are using USB drive our machines has to be always on at home, I would rater using a NAS but if we go that route, is the NAS is a x86 CPU Resilio will require a server license and that way more money.

We are testing Dropbox to see if we can do something similar, but Dropbox manages their folders their way, and that doesn't match our server structure.

Also I have noticed sometimes while working on Unreal project, when Unreal creates a temporary file, Drop box start uploading it right away, but then Unreal try to delete that file(because it was temporary) then Drop box get confused and lock Unreal. Not sure is some setting we can adjust but so far it happened a few times.

We are also wondering if having everything on the cloud would be better, Workstations and server assets. In that case latency should be a minimum, but I don't have any experience with that. I hope some one else would share that info.
obviously I didn't talk about remote desktop and VPN because the same issues of latency, besides at home I have a solid 400Mb connection but when connected to our company VNP it drops to 80Mb so that make thing very slow.

 

Best luck.

 

[Tom Bussey]

Thanks, yes I thought it had been discussed recently, but couldn't find the thread. I think you're probably right, VPN seems a bit of a bottleneck which is probably why Parsec felt a bit snappier than my VPN/RSP connection. 

I actually just set up my asset library to sync with my home NAS (QNAS/QSync), so a setup like yours could work to an extent. The issues I found when doing this before was a) offloading/backing up image sequences/Max files when my local storage started filling up - very slow over the VPN to company server, and b) I have to work in my lounge so having a huge tower whirling away in the corner was not great when trying to unwind in the evening. It's obviously the best in terms of graphical performance though.

 

Edit: I guess my situation's a little bit unique in that I'm looking for a LAN solution. That feels like it's more likely to get good results than one over the internet. In fact I just need to go in and try RDP from another computer on the network as in theiry that'll be the same.

Edited December 22, 2021 by Tom Bussey

[Francisco Penaloza]

If you are in the same LAN network, ( I know redundancy) then you should be fine with Windows remote desktop.  I use all the time when at the office to remote our render nodes. Sometimes I find my self doing some modeling on those too.

Our company has a very robust network, with 10 Gb Servers and switch. Even the cables plays a good part on maintaining the speed.  If you are physically side by side your work office, then you may consider talking with a IT person that could recommend the best cable and switch/bridges to extend your networks to home.  If you go wireless or through the internet then you need to deal with extra latency and download or upload speeds.  Mines at home is 400 down 100 up, but my colleague has 100 down and 10 up so that's why we decided using the sync method instead direct connection.

 

[Tom Bussey]

Our network isn't all that, probably the bare minimum 1Gb network, but hopefully enough for the graphical bandwidth. One downside of working in an Architects office is that Revit is a fair bit less intensive on moving data around so my lamentations about network speeds tend to fall on deaf ears. 10Gb network sounds like the dream.

[Scott Schroeder]

I think your LAN solution should work in theory, I don't think you'd see much degradation in running cable that far as long as you use good cable and have decent network switches. I know you said it's not ideal, but I think having a full power computer at your home that is just wired into your work LAN would be the fastest solution over even RDP. Any remote connection to another computer, even on the same network, can be odd when working in GPU intensive programs like max or Photoshop.

Oddly enough, where I work we use Direct Access Connection to get into our work network but we also have a VPN connection. I have to use VPN since it's the connection that allows our iToo licenses to pass through, and I actually get far better download speeds to/from work over VPN than I do Direct Access.

[Tom Bussey]

I have to admit, I think you're right. I tried RDP from another PC on the network and while it was better than via VPN it still wasn't quite up to the level of direct control, so the PC is coming home with me. It should be ok as since last time I had it here I've had a much quieter CPU cooler fitted, so it's actually pretty unobtrusive, even when rendering. I also have my own NAS now which should be big enough for saving frames to. 

 

 

[Scott Dombrowski]

For most of the pandemic, we've been fully remote with our workstations at home. We have a VPN connection back to the office to access our network drives and the download speeds aren't too bad. We're stuck with Comcast for home internet, so the best upload I can get is 35Mbps.

We're just now starting to transition back to the office (thought it's been pushed back a couple of times), so we need to be able to support a hybrid work schedule with some days at home, some in the office. A laptop would be the simplest solution, but we'd be sacrificing quite a bit of performance. So what we've settled on for now is to keep our workstations in the office and remote in using Teradici PCoIP software. I did some limited testing and it seemed to work ok. No appreciable lag that was present when using RDP. Video editing worked fine, and it even allowed the use of Sketchup and Enscape remotely which was not possible with RDP. We hope to deploy in the next few weeks and then I'll be able to really put it through its paces. I think our IT guy said it was $200/yr per license, but it had a 5 license minimum, so it isn't ideal for just one or two people.