[Kevron]

Hi, I have an animation I want to render across the network. My standard workflow is to send dependencies and off it goes.

But I am here to learn, so how would you send a job to the farm that don't need to export the scene material for every frame? If I have 70 materials in the scene, I see they are all exported at every frame.

Network rendering works good for me, just wondering about the best practice of doing it. In our farm there is a mix of pc and macs. I know that is not ideal, but it is our current situation. The manager is on one of the macs.

I haven't really gone to the very depth of this subject, but I am heading there. I guess that checking send dependencies means to send all the necessary scene files at every frame.

How do you do it on your local farm?

Regards,
Tor Martin

[Ernesto]

As far as I know, it is the only way.
E

[numerobis]

i can't say how it works for animations, but for me disabling "send dependencies" is much faster (for stills).

[polynurb]

hi martin,

send dependencies basically changes the way dependencies are provided to the nodes;

for each frame rendered these files will need to be reloaded to the render nodes, maxwell right now has no way to cache that kind of information in local(node) ram between frames.

the slowdown you are seeing with send dependencies is because all files are sent via the computer running the *edit:monitor, and this process of redistribution is sometimes slower than direct access to a file server.

if you uncheck send dependencies, you need to make sure that all the original file paths are made accessible via the OS of the individual nodes, typically by connecting to the identical server drive.

but this also means that all nodes, when starting a render, will pretty much try to access the same file at the same time.
so the server should be fit to handle that kind of I/O in order to maintain stability.

with send dependencies this process is 'software' controlled by the manager, and i'd say more reliable in certain situations, but as you noticed often slower.


daniel

[polynurb]

btw.:

http://support.nextlimit.com/display/ma ... s+and+tips

[Kevron]

Thank you guys for chiming inn, and especially Daniel for taking your time to write a comprehendible answer on what happens behind the curtains.

I´ll reckon "send dependancies" is the best way for me to go at the moment. When sending to network, I am not using a network path, so the manager collects all the rendered files and put them in the right folder. I have tried sometimes to convert the path (Pressing the "retry" button), but that did not give me any stable results. Sometimes it worked flawless, other times the mac´s did not fine the network folder and other times the Pc did not find the specified folder.

I dont actually think it caused by Maxwell, I think the problems lies with me, not really understanding how mac´s and pc´s talk to each other over a server.

Thanks,
Tor Martin

[dariolanza]

Hi Kevron,

That's exactly the point: under certain circumstances, Mac OS has problems to understand or even translate Windows network paths, so you could get those missing dependencies issues like the ones you are describing.
As we can not fix it in our end, we offer the "Send dependencies" option, that as Daniel describes, broadcasts all the needed file when a job is submitted. Although it multiplies the network traffic, it can be safer in mixed farms like yours, than network paths approach.

Greetings

Dario Lanza