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View Full Version : How to setup renders to make better use of satellite?

rygoody
01-15-2007, 09:40 PM
So I got satellite working in the office with maya 8.
I get the confirming message of
MSG 0.0 info : adding new host 1 (icon-3.IAP.local:7105)
JOB 0.0 info : started thread 0 on icon-3 now known as host 1
so I'm sure everything is working right.
But it doesn't seem to send tasks to the slave very much. I did a render of a cube with AA sampling of 4 4 just to give it something real quick that would take time to render. Which it used the slave quite a bit in that render, the slave participated in the render maybae 40% of the time. But it seems that as I get more complex scenes and more complex shaders, it is less likely to utlize the slave as much. I rendered a shot of a house and it didn't even manage to get one task from the slave. I attribute this to possibly translation time and the time it needs to send stuff over the network. So I'm just wondering, how do I set up my scenes and workflow to make the most use of the slaves? What exactly does MR have to do to get the slave in the render? I've started making my Maya projects on a network drive that all the slaves can get to, is there anything else to do?
bgawboy
01-16-2007, 04:50 PM
More complex scenes should do better with the satellite.
In simple scenes, the network communication overhead outweighs its usefulness.
A cube test is not something I would recommend for testing satellite. Also,
if your house is one, single, all-in-one tesselated object or polygon mesh, it might
not spend much time on the satellite machine.

The tile size, and not the anti-aliasing setting affects the distribution of render jobs.
See http://www.lamrug.org/resources/samplestips.html
Each tile is a job that can be passed to a different thread, one thread per CPU core.
The size of a tile can be set with the Task Size parameter in the Memory and Performance tab of mental ray Globals.

Each tesselation is also a job, but if a tile is on the master machine which then requires a tesselation, it will probably also happen on the master. Then, it might not be as efficient to pass that tesselation to a satellite machine to render a tile there, if it is the only thing in your scene.

Try a scene with multiple objects spread around in the viewing frame.
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