[Eric Lagman]

I finally got a chance to play with network coop rendering this weekend. It seems to work fairly well in most cases with a few exceptions.

1. When trying to render out a large image 2500x1875 I have issues. I would open the mxs in the viewer and send it out to my massive two computer render farm . It then would sit there forever (3hrs) with recieving scene in the status for both nodes, but nothing was happening on the server end. I could not stop it or cancel the render either when it was in this state. I had to go to each machine, and close the server to make it let go which crashed the manager by the way. I did specifiy a mxi path in the viewer, and opend the mxs first in the viewer so that cant be the issue. Like I said I have got it to work before, so I am confused.

2. Next I though I will turn on HD in the viewer and see if this helps because of the size maybe. I dont think HD has anything to do with actually kicking the render off, but maybe it does. It did start, and each node switched to rendering status. Checked the servers, and they were rendering. About 20 minutes into the render when it tries to save the first jpeg from the render the server kicks back an error saying Hard Drive option not available with Multilight and crashes the server. Minutes later the same thing happens on the other server. Funny thing is I did not have ml checked off in the viewer or in the scene file that it was using so I dont know how I got that error.

Concluding my dilemma here. Has anyone else had issues rendering large images with network coop? Does HD work with network coop, and if so do i need to enable it in the mxs file or the viewer, or does it matter. Since I only have two computers right now I just decided to render them manually in the viewer on each machine with different seeds, and manually merge them. So far each machine is producing an image. I would like to have this working though. I am anticipating buying a few more render slaves to set up a mini-farm. Thanks in advance for any help.

Also if any of the admins read this maybe there could be a sticky, or category for network rendering. There seems to be a lot of questions on this spread out all over the forum. I did searches before asking the above questions, but the info is so spread out, and unfocused. Since this feature is so important to getting an image from maxwell in a reasonable time it deserves its own category I think. At least a sticky?

[arch4d]

i just tried to render out two scenes with network render over this weekend.
Wanteed to use the network render as a batch rendering tool.

SHOULDN´T HAVE DONE THAT !!!

I turned on the -hd switch to be sure it renders out at 2500 x 1800px.

And what happened ?

The Alpha Channel and ID Material Channel has rendered out, BUT NO IMAGE !!!

If anyone knows where the image should be, please help.

These images each have rendered for 30 hours now, and the manager said : "render succesful",
so where is the image ???

please help

[Eric Lagman]

I think something is whacked when using hd with network. I did not see in the manual that this is not working, but who knows. My render also rendered out the alpha right before it crashed telling me I couldnt use hd and multilight together. Multi-light was not even checked off when I rendered the scene NL please fix all the bugs with Network render. There seem to be quite a few.

[b-kandor]

Arch4d - Have you found any mxi files in your maxwell root?

Eric: yes a network/coop sticky is a good idea. As for your hd problems I have no experience, I only wanted -hd to let me use more lights with -ml, since they don't work together I havn't used it.


My current concern is about the extremly slow network transfer speed during the merging process. My systems are sending data at 350kb/ second on a gigabit lan capable of 30mb/sec.

I waited 2 hours to merge between 3 machines on sat.

Kandor

[arch4d]

Arch4d - Have you found any mxi files in your maxwell root?
r

hi b-kandor,

no mxi files...
i didn´t check "create mxi" when creating the job in mxcl.

[b-kandor]

Hi arch4D,

Don't quote me but if you don't create an mxi file when coop rendering there is no way to merge the output of seperate nodes. If your only writing image files they will represent the output of only one node (the one that most recently updated it's sl)

Although you mention you had no image either, not sure what happened there?

[arch4d]

hi b-kandor,

i didn´t do coop rendering...
just wanted to use the network rendering tool as a batch rendering tool with one single machine.

so i created two jobs with mxcl, did not check the write mxi button, but checked the use -hd button.
gave both jobs 30 hours rendering time and started.

then the alpha channel jpg and the mat id channel jpg were written, but no image.

don´t know what happened there, but i think it´s a bug...