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Hi,

i'm planning to build a small network for rendering. The question is now, where does the mxi files will be saved using coop rendering?
local on each node or on the manager computer? And how much RAM does the manager need to merge the files? Is it the same amount
like for rendering a scene or more/less if i don't need to open the merged scene or mxi on the manager?

...not so easy question?!?

as far as i'm aware they're saved in to maxwell temp folders on each system and then merged to the final mxi ...but that's from a mac set up.

Same with Windows. First, all scene assets are copied to each node in a local temp file, then while rendering, each node saves it's mxi to a local temp file. Only at the end are they all merged together and saved to the final network location, and as far as I know, no significant amount of extra RAM is necessary during merging. The mxi's are just transferred over the network during the merging process (not necessarily on the manager).

thanks for the answers! That's what i thought. Sounds good!
So would it be possible to have a manager with only 4GB RAM? (the nodes will have 12GB).

And another important question: do i need a license for the manager or only for the nodes?

And what happens when i hit the preview button on the mxw monitor? How is the preview generated.
Will all the mxi's have to be merged for this preview?

Bubbaloo wrote:Only at the end are they all merged together and saved to the final network location, and as far as I know, no significant amount of extra RAM is necessary during merging. The mxi's are just transferred over the network during the merging process (not necessarily on the manager).

When the render is complete, the MXIs are transferred to Manager. If there's not enough RAM, they are not merged and the manager just crashes. I tried this million times with multilight MXI's not been able to merge while having 12Gb RAM on a manager machine (XServe running Mac OS X 10.6.4)

This used to be a problem in 2.0 but should be fixed in 2.1. Please let us know if you still have problems merging large MXIs.

Mihai wrote:This used to be a problem in 2.0 but should be fixed in 2.1. Please let us know if you still have problems merging large MXIs.

so 4GB should be enough?

numerobis wrote: So would it be possible to have a manager with only 4GB RAM? (the nodes will have 12GB).

And another important question: do i need a license for the manager or only for the nodes?

And what happens when i hit the preview button on the mxw monitor? How is the preview generated.
Will all the mxi's have to be merged for this preview?

I can answer the third question. Yes, they will be merged when you push the preview button.

Mihai wrote:This used to be a problem in 2.0 but should be fixed in 2.1. Please let us know if you still have problems merging large MXIs.

Yes, Mihai, I am using 2.1 and it's still a problem. I can't get a preview and can't merge final results on large MXIs.

Bubbaloo wrote:I can answer the third question. Yes, they will be merged when you push the preview button.

Thank You Brian!