General Maya rendering queries.

#1

Few questions regarding rendering, irrespective of the render engine:-

[ul]Does batch render output faster than rendering on renderView, I mean in a UI.
[/ul]

[ul]Is commandline rendering faster than batch rendering?[/ul]

[ul]What kind of network do you build (hardware, like LAN cables, modems or routers) for machines to utilize the cores of multiple machines on a network for rendering?
Say a software like ‘deadline,’ is being used.[/ul]

Thank You
-G

#2
  1. No.
  2. No.
  3. Please be more specific: Do you need to render one image on multiple cores and multiple machines, or do you need to distribute multiple frames seperatly to multiple machines? In the second case, we use a gigabit backbone with 100mbit switches and cache files locally.
#3

Thanks,
Yes, I want to render one image (or sequence of images), on my local machine utilizing cores from the other machines as well.

And I wasn’t really aware of the second option you mentioned, thanks for that.
so it is possible to distribute frames to multiple machine, yes?

How does a software like deadline help?

Regards.

#4

Render management systems like deadline distribute frames over a renderfarm. Not sure how it behaves with single frames distributed over multiple machines. But this is a bit difficult to handle because e.g. for mentalray you need a sattelite or a standalone deamon on a slave machine which collides with a normal batch rendering.

#5

Oh! Thanks for clearing the confusion regarding, single frame rendering & multiple frame rendering.

Doesn’t VRAY’s distribution feature help in rendering single frame by using multiple cores of other machine?

I thought deadline can help do that with Arnold.

#6

Sorry I don’t have much experience with distributing single frames over the network. Maybe someone else can help with this topic.

#7

No problem, thanks a lot !!

#8

Using vray and deadline here i can tell you that it does work to distribute one image to several machines and in that way get more cores rendering one image.

However, its not like the regular distributed checkbox that is in the vray rendersettings, for that you dont need deadline. When submitting a frame throu deadline you can choose to split it up to several machines, then assemble that frame after the redering is done, There are pros and cons with this. If your renderoutput is multichanel exrs then the passes will not be assembled and that needs to be done manually wich can be a pain in the ass.

Why not just use the distributed option in vray settings?
What you need to do is to add the hostnames or ipadresses of the slaves that have vray installed and then enable them.

Sometimes it stops working for no apparent reason, i havent found a fix for it yet, On different projects different slaves gives up and wont be working eve thou we reboot them. Just getting the error message that the computer actively denied the connection even thou firewall and antivirus is off on those machines. Next project they might work fine again, and its always different slaves.

Hope this helps you.

#9

Thank You Eric,

           I don't use multi-channel exr's, so no worries on that regard.

I mainly wanted to know about ‘use’ of deadline and its relation to render engine.

Here we use Arnold, VRAY for few aspects but mainly Arnold. Never used deadline till now, and before implementing it, wanted to know how to use core’s from other machines to render one image.