Synology local paths and remote paths

[Juan Mermot]

We are a small archviz studio that just bought a Synology NAS DS1621+. We currently have 6 people working from the office on a local network and a couple outside of the county working remotely. The artist working on the local network do not have any issuu with bitmap relinking or assets (because it´s the same path for everyone), but the remote artist working with the synology drive, can not have the same path for all the local textures & proxies.

I have been reading about UNC file and relative path in 3dsmax. What do any of you recommend for this situation for 3dsmax to automatically relink all the assets (mainly when having many xref linked to a file) even though the path is not exactly the same? How do professional studios work around this?

[Casey Hawley]

Look into utilizing the VPN features of your network router. The remote artist would connect via VPN to your local network.

If your local artists use UNC paths (network paths that start with //), then the remote artist should be able to open any project over the VPN and keep the bitmaps linked as if the artist was local. This requires that the remote computer can find the NAS by its network/machine name.

If the local artists instead have the NAS drive mapped (e.g. Z:/sharedfolder/textures/...) then the remote artist would need to map the NAS drive to the same drive letter/path that the locals use. 

Either way, regardless if the NAS can be found by its name or not, as long as the artist can connect to the local network, they will be able to point Max to the mapped drive or network server to re-link bitmaps if necessary. This would be the simplest way to solve the issue, only needing to have a secure VPN setup (and decent bandwidth).

Perhaps you already know this, but linking bitmaps to a remote server over the internet is less efficient the more links a project has. And every time the remote artist presses Render, all of the remote data is read into memory, which can slow things down considerably with larger projects, especially if your network bandwidth isn't robust.

A more expensive solution to this is to provide a local workstation on the premises. Have them connect to the network via VPN and then connect to their workstation via Remote Desktop. This way, the paths will always be local, the software/licenses stay local, plus rendering will be more efficient by reducing bandwidth utilization over the VPN.

Edited Wednesday at 04:42 PM by Casey Hawley