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would be great if someone had the time to explain this in modrately simple terms

as of 1.7.1, it still doesn't work no matter what you do, so you'll have to wait for software fixes before a tutorial can come. I've tried everything - using smb, disabling Appletalk, networked disks, local files and only the simplest scenes with no textures have succeeded, occasionally. If I sound annoyed, it's because I spent $400 for a network render node to meet a deadline and ended up wasting time that could have simply been spent rendering on the one machine, which I had to do in the end and send to print unfinished.

I to have wasted many fruitless hours trying to get software to work.
It would be nice of maxwell to post the problems it would save a lot of angry messages, it is like they do not care about wasting our valuable time and loss of fee paying hours!

well they simply shouldn't sell render nodes for Mac OS X users if the thing doesn't work. I really like Maxwell but this is very upsetting when they release something so broken that it's unusable and it's not like we're the minority - I'd love to see a video of someone at Nextlimit actually getting a co-op render with textures working in OS X.

The documentation says that you can mix OSes for render nodes. LOL - are you kidding me? you can't even get two Mac ones not to crash and you are telling people that you can have a Windows/Linux server help?

Yes, please show us how to use this feature!

I would also like a foolproof tutorial on how to render over a simple network. I can't see to get my second Intel 8core mac to render in a network with one other intelmac 8 core. Since others report functionality I would love to know how to get it to work.
Thanks in advande, Francois

the reason I had problems with network render was the name of the harddrive was the same name as a user, even though I was logged in as a different user.

Now it is working without any problems.

Are you able to see the intel mac in the mxcl>network (tab)>connect
(right hand bottom pane)?

I still have problems and it's not due to that. I even had Ignatio from Next Limit log into my machine and try to get the machines to render but many different attempts failed.

at what point is it failing?

when the network node receives the file. It crashes.

Has anyone tried Modo's network rendering? You check the box for network rendering and make sure that other machines have modo running and you are done! You can see yellow buckets for your local machine and blue buckets for your nodes and they all chomp away at the image until its done.

It is REALLY unfortunate that this is seemingly insurmountable for Next Limits programmers. Just make it work like Modo.

please !!

While waiting for a fully usable networking feature, you can always use your rendernode licenses to run the component mxis separately on each node and then compose them manually...it's what i do every day and is not that uncomfortable...just make sure you are using different CPU IDs!

Daniel Hruby wrote:Has anyone tried Modo's network rendering? You check the box for network rendering and make sure that other machines have modo running and you are done! You can see yellow buckets for your local machine and blue buckets for your nodes and they all chomp away at the image until its done.

It is REALLY unfortunate that this is seemingly insurmountable for Next Limits programmers. Just make it work like Modo.

ya, this is the way that Mental Ray and Maya work too (with a bit more setup). It would be nice to see in MAxwell

In Modo the UI is set up to look good, to be consistent and reliable. Its also not easy to use but never impossible or completely untested. And the UI is most often predictable. I think the succes of Modo is partly because of this.

Maxwell is on the other side of the scale. Weird texture image path problems, no working network render although it has all the buttons and knobs to make you think otherwise, difficult to handle geometry and much more.