[wagurto]

does anybody have tested the network render yet? Is it reallu estable and realiable?

[b-kandor]

I just tested it (only on 4 machines) and it seems great so far! You still need to run manager, render and server on your main system (if you plan to render on it as well) but once render is running you can just go straight to the network tab, add your job and all the settings are available in that tab. My farm machines showed up automatically, there is full detail showing for each farm machine - and if you highlight a machine and click the display button it creates a tab that shows a 'live' preview of that machines output. Sweet

[simmsimaging]

Hey -
I'm a complete noob when it comes to network renders and I have been messing around all night trying to do one with no luck.

From what I can see it seems I need to have the mxs and supporting files located on an attached network drive. Is that right? I'm trying to run a co-op render with 3 of my machines, but do I need to have the mxs on a 4th? I'm running manager and server on my main box; I have the msx and support files in a shared folder there, but when I load the mxs Maxwell just keeps warning me that the mxs is on a 'local' drive (which it doesn't like I gather) and then when I go ahead with it the network render fails.

Can someone offer an idiots guide to setting this up - I'm getting nowhere very, very slowly.

[b-kandor]

Hi Brett,

Your mxs file simply needs to accessible from all of your machines using the same path. So either map a shared drive/folder to a common letter (so that each machine has a 'M' drive for example) or use a unc path eg. //mymachinename/folder/. If you have a common drive letter like 'M' then you should be able to ignore that message,

You have server running on all your farm machines I assume? And do they all show up in the farm list box located on the render tab? In any case try the unc path and see how that works.

Kandor

ps - It was really really nice to see my machines send and merge the file in less than a minute That's a huge improvement over what used to take 30 minutes or more!!!

[simmsimaging]

Thanks very much Kandor. I'll try it out today!

b