Mental Ray Satellite not using enough Slave CPU

#1

Hey peoples,
I have a scene weighing in at 300,000 poly. 6 Cheap Lights and two of them are casting shadows. Not rediculous, but still each frame is taking 2 minutes. I have 1 slave machine over MR Satellite. The problem is that its using 100% on my master machine, and 10% on my slave. I understand distribution, but still, only 10% of my slave machine? Thats not fair. I want faster, better, stronger performace!

How can I boost up slave cpu distribution? How complex does a scene have to be to validate sending over more work? Thanks!

-John

#2

Use a network drive to store all your files and that’ll be the fastest it goes.

Also, if your doing still shots, animate the camera so each frame is a different still. I found this increases slave involvement in the render, because by the time it reaches the second still, everything will already be cached from the first frame and it will get involved quicker.

#3

it is an old problem, that sat rendering in maya has very biased CPU usage.

the only thing i found to get it working a bit better is using the -mm flag when rendering.
(that means rendering in command line).

if you set a high value there (-mm means max memory), mental ray lets the slave render bigger chunks. like that you get less network traffic and communication overhead when rendering and the CPU load gets a bit more equal… but it wont get 100% 100% :confused:

cheers

alex

#4

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