[brodie_geers]

So I'm looking at rendering something at 3600px with multilight on and it's going to have about a dozen sliders. I'm doing a test atm and it's looking to be something over 3gigs and it's been writing the initial MXI for 20 minutes (and still going).

It seems like that's really going to crimp the render times right, if every update takes 20+ minutes? Is there some way around this like less updates or that sort of thing?

-Brodie

[Half Life]

There isn't any simulens on that is there? That will really slow down write times...

Best,
Jason.

[brodie_geers]

I've got devignetting set to 100 but as I understand it, that's the only simulens that doesn't add to write times

It's now up to 27 min. and around 3.7gigs

-brodie

[brodie_geers]

final came out at 30 min. and just a hair of 4g

-brodie

[brodie_geers]

i also had 4 channels (render, alpha, object id, and mat id). I'll try again with just render channel and no devignetting

-brodie

[brodie_geers]

also, where should the Temp folders be pathed to for the nodes and manager? local hard drive or network drive?

It seems like whenever i go to Open Temp folder in the monitor the folder is empty

-brodie

[brodie_geers]

that brought it down to 22m and 3.6g. Not as much help as I was hoping for.

-Brodie

[Half Life]

I usually do my alpha and object ID passes separately on a render with something like Sky dome (no emitters) lighting and the default material override to get faster results... for outdoor scenes that tends to render very quickly.

Material ID I might try a separate render with sky dome just to see if it goes faster.

I try my best not to bloat my multi-light files with too many extra channels... especially ones which don't use lighting data/surface detail.

It also might be worth the time to render a much smaller test version and just tweak the lights for the final render based off the multi-light settings you end up with for the final render (with no multi-light).

Network nodes tend to have the temp files on network folder path.

Best,
Jason.

[Bubbaloo]

Do you have color multilight turned on? That might explain the huge file size. Try rendering it at that size on only one computer and see if the write time is the same.

As far as I know, cooperative renders have their temp files locally and only write to the network drive when the render is stopped. But I'm pretty sure that there is an option to change it. Make sure it's not pointing to a network drive. You wouldn't want it to have to write that huge file to the network at every update.

These two options may help you:

[Half Life]

Good call.

[brodie_geers]

Thanks bub, I thought I recalled such a setting.

Actually those tests were just on one computer. I was making sure I had enough RAM for it to run at full res w/ ML. I just have ML intensity turned on (not Color), but I was hoping to do some lighting color tweaks in Photoshop so having the separate channels when you bring the MXI into PS would greatly help. I may be able to part with that if I have to, however I've got a number of IES lights and although they can be tweaked in the Emixxer at render time I couldn't find a way to edit the power in the material itself which means I have to turn ML on (unless I'm missing something?).

As a side note, my network rendering issues are becoming more and more bothersome. I only have 2 computers (including the one I'm working on which is the Manager), yet I constantly have repeat issues. For example, I started a test render last night on the Network. It sent all the dependencies and then just never started doing anything after that. That happens occasionally and I don't know why (here's the log http://dl.dropbox.com/u/384281/log1.html which is set to Debug mode). And then when I hit Stop it basically sticks on the following screen. Under State it shows it being stopped and the nodes as ready, but under Info it says it's still in the process of stopping. And then in the middle left, you'll notice the render nodes haven't been released (here's the log from one of the nodes http://dl.dropbox.com/u/384281/log%20node.html ). And they never get released until I shot down and restart the node. This is a hassle as the second machine is a server down in IT, so I have to get one of the IT guys to restart the node at least once a day (which is a lot considering I don't Network render very much).




I'll try some more tests today.

-Brodie

[Half Life]

Last I checked multilight did not work with IES -- are they working for you?

Best,
Jason.

[brodie_geers]

Interesting possible work around to one of the above issues. In the previous state where the nodes were stuck in Rendering mode while they weren't actually rendering, the Reset and Reset All buttons don't do anything. I manually turned off and restarted the node on this computer and then when I reset the other node it seems to have worked. Oddly it then told me that my node was 'disconnected' so I had to restart it again manually but now they both SHOW that they're ready to go. If it works that would save me from calling IT all the time.

-Brodie

[brodie_geers]

Last I checked multilight did not work with IES -- are they working for you?

Best,
Jason.

Sure.



-Brodie

[Half Life]

gotcha, you are not using color... I missed that. I love color multilight so I tend to never use the old version.

Best,
Jason.