Maxwell Render | Official public forum

Hello there,

as an intro, let me just explain the way i work, in 2 words (+-) :
- I do prefer render in Maxwell for abvious reasons i will not explain here...
- I'm involved in still images, often for print (so HD ones)... a very few animations...
- My customers are most kitchen and bathroom makers, so the scene can be heavy with a lot of inter reflexions / refractions...
- I have 20 dedicated rendernodes to render
- Until now, as soon as the project i'm working on demands the rendering of several 1000's of pictures (www.oskab.com : +13000 files for kitchen furnitures), i have to go back to Vray (wich i like also, but not as much as i like Maxwell

I'm now at the very beginning of a new huge project for another kitchen customer... a way more big / famous one here in France...
that is a great new, isn't it ?
BUT : i'd love to manage this one 100% with Maxwell render... to have some differences from Oskab, and to get more accurate renders...

My question / post here is about reliability : I REALLY NEED TO HAVE A RENDER QUEUE THAT WORKS STABLE...
My experience with Maxwell Network is not this positive :
- for no reason, this node or tat one will not start rendering, and it was rendering well the last job, and will probably render well the next one... no way to fix / track the problem here...
- when a node is faulty or released from a job, no way to get it back in the rendering
- when this occurs, the final SL is a little down, so i have to check manually and resume render on those ones : not good for plenty of frames / pix...
- if Manager goes down : the render queue is lost : missing here a save / load render queue button
- Often, when a node is faulty, i have to manually quit renderNode program and restart it

So i need some experts tips here : what do i miss regarding of network rendering ?

Here is some facts about my network :
- every rendernode is win7pro, when i first started rendernode, i answered "yes" for the wbuilt-in firewall question, license is well set;
- the manager is on a dedicated PC running windows server 2012 and manually set the exe in the firewall to be open, same for the ports 45454-45474;
- the switches / cables are Gigabits-ready;
- on each rendernode i can acces the rendermanager PC, and vice-versa;
- last but not least : i'm using the last stable release of maxwell (2.7.20.0), and i owned all the needed licenses (3+18)

So, please, MX network exerts, please... tell me if i forgot something very important here

regards.

edit : i've read on the forum that Qube render manager can be ok... but it is not free (very expensive and rent only)...
edit 2 : with Vray, i use backburner : free with max and very reliable, even if minimalist... it manages good the lost of nodes, and the new ones pupping up...

Of course, if i can't get a MX network that is stable and reliable, i'll have to go back to VR... not really what i want here...

We have reached a point of relative stability with Network Render but the problem is, it's only stable if we don't touch it and nothing changes. Forget adding or subtracting nodes, forget stable job canceling, etc. Network render can use all its features perfectly well sometimes, but the problem is that "sometimes" doesn't work in a production environment, so for now we just use it with absolute minimal tampering. Firewall turned completely off as well.

If I were you I would test it with some large batch of images and see how you fare. For your project, I think it could be workable, but may take some patience.

I'll test with Firewall and Antivirus turned off...

Yesterday i juste started a queue, adding jobs one after the other... and it went crazy... some nodes disconnected themselves, and so on... after 1 hour i had to kill all processes and start one picture after each other, by hand...

Maybe without firewall...

Some logs showed errors about ports... even with the ports open in FW...

Anyway, a "queue load / save" function is a real must-have !

Side note: did you notice that Qube has daily license rentals? Maybe you could use it for the full 30 day trial period and then switch to daily rentals?

hatts wrote:Side note: did you notice that Qube has daily license rentals? Maybe you could use it for the full 30 day trial period and then switch to daily rentals?

It is a possibility... but ok, NL dev team is a good one, i guess they could / should make Manager / Monitor behave a better way...
and for free, because 3dsmax + some licenses for maxwell is expensive enough...

Hi,
I feel your pain.

I made the experience that rendering with "send dependencies" off is much more stable. Never use "use any render node available". I would also turn off anti virus and firewall.

Cheers and good luck.

Florian

limbus wrote:Hi,

I made the experience that rendering with "send dependencies" off is much more stable.

same here. nodes are also loading files much faster if turned off.

daniel

limbus wrote:Hi,
I feel your pain.

I made the experience that rendering with "send dependencies" off is much more stable. Never use "use any render node available". I would also turn off anti virus and firewall.

Cheers and good luck.

Florian

Ok, so i guess that - like BBurner does - i should use network-only maps / ies files and let the nodes to go get them...

About "Never use "use any render node available"", should i set manually the nodes to render this or that job ?
If i have several to send, it can be quite a pain to do so...