[Renato Lemus]

The network render is broken. In case you succeed, u will need to merge the mxi files manually anyway. For now it's much easier to render off line in each machine, giving them different seeds and merge the mxi's manually.

[Leonardo]

how do you merge them manually?
I'm not going to get upset but... what is the point of all this if you have to manually merge them

...Another option is to go to Best Buy and buy a network HD. They plug in directly to your router. That's what I use. Very effective and you don't have to make sure the machine that your external HD is plugged into is on.

This sound like a good idea.. does this Network HD have any setbacks? are they fast down/uploading files? reliable and secure?

[misterasset]

They're as secure as any computer behind the firewall of your router. And as far as speed they're as fast as however fast your network is. Basically it would be the same as accessing your USB HD but without having to have an extra computer act as a "go between."

As far as network rendering being broken, I haven't found that to be the case for me, although it is tedious. I did notice some problems from your screen shot.

1.) Why do you have the same computer connected twice? Or how did you even do that? If this is in fact three seperate computers then two of them are sharing the same IP which might be a HUGE problem.
2.) It's trying to finish. The one that says Success should be sending its MXI to the one saying "Waiting for MXI..." then it would "Combining MXIs.." and then be done. The problem here might be that it doesn't know which computer to send it to since two are on the same IP.

I would run a smaller test. Your settings show that it was a SL 25, 48 hour render. Set it for SL 8, 8 minutes and let it finish on its own. See if that gets you anywhere. If not there are other options.

[Leonardo]

1.) Why do you have the same computer connected twice? Or how did you even do that?

are you asking me?

In that test I'm only running two pc 103 fail once for absolutely no reason but did ok the second time arround

would this do the trick:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136052

any recomendations for a network hd?

leo

[Fernando Tella]

I would go for a 10/100/1000 (Gigabit) instead of a 10/100 and for the network cards in the PCs too. We have to move big files every time we launch a render. Think about the size of mxs and mxi files.

[Leonardo]

BTW.....

what does this means?


does this means? that both files got merge? where is it?



leo

[misterasset]

Congratulations It worked. Now, here's the hard part.

Unless you were watching it when it finished, you have no idea which machine it's on. Fun, right?

When you do it for real, specify a location for the MXI on a network drive and that will be the combined one it writes... but for now go to the machines and in the...

C:\Program Files\Next Limit\Maxwell\

folder you should find two MXIs, "cooperative.mxi" and "merge.mxi." The machine that has the final MXI will have both of those files. It's one of those two. Open them both up, the one with the higher SL is the merged file. (I've found that most times cooperative.mxi is the merged file, go figure)

[Leonardo]

oh yeah



I am the man

[Leonardo]

Congratulations It worked. Now, here's the hard part.

Unless you were watching it when it finished, you have no idea which machine it's on. Fun, right?

When you do it for real, specify a location for the MXI on a network drive and that will be the combined one it writes... but for now go to the machines and in the...

C:\Program Files\Next Limit\Maxwell\

folder you should find two MXIs, "cooperative.mxi" and "merge.mxi." The machine that has the final MXI will have both of those files. It's one of those two. Open them both up, the one with the higher SL is the merged file. (I've found that most times cooperative.mxi is the merged file, go figure)

yeah, that is why I was asking... however, I was worry if specified a place to save the mxi... that all 3 machines would try to save the same file in the same location re-writing the file over and over no? lol

[misterasset]

Nope, if you specify a location that will be the final combined MXI. The computers each write to their own C:\ drive a "cooperative.mxi" file and then you saw how it combines and sends them on to the next machine until the last one sends it to the specified location.

If these are all network computers, keep in mind that whoever is logged into that machine while it's being a render slave/server needs to have permission to write to the C:\ drive otherwise it won't work.

So complicated.

[Leonardo]

If these are all network computers, keep in mind that whoever is logged into that machine while it's being a render slave/server needs to have permission to write to the C:\ drive otherwise it won't work.

So complicated.

that could be a problem... how could I confirm this? could the rendering says success and still failed?



I just check with a specific file.mxi and it seems to work!

leo

[misterasset]

Two options... you can either start a (non-network) rendering on there and tell it to write to the C:\ drive and see if it does, simple test.

The other option would be to log in as an Administrator to each machine and give all users Read/Write control over the Next Limit folder (and child objects). Unless you're storing company secrets in that folder it shouldn't be a problem. That way, no matter who is logged into the machine Maxwell can write the cooperative.mxi file to the Next Limit folder.

[Leonardo]

Now, that we are talking about networks... how does people connect printers and scanner to a router?

[Leonardo]

Okay!! it work in the small scene/test... now that I try a larger file (340MB .mxs) all three machibes say: Receiving Scene... but nothing happens?