Mental Ray...Backburner and BLANK (not black) frames

#1

We are having a issue with max and backburner when network rendering BLANK frames.

Black frames on the local machine takes about 2 seconds but on the render farm machine it takes around 3 minutes.
the local machine is a dual core and the render machine is a Quad…so the speed of the machines arn’t the issue

(environment is set to black…so if it was set to red, then red frames taking longer to render on backburner compared to on a local machine, or even Alpha frames…maybe thats a better explination)

does anyone else have this issue or a solution?

#2

Are you taking into account time to load max and then render the frame?

Is the max file literally NOTHING but an environment color?

#3

The bottleneck when it comes to network rendering is the data transfer from one machine to the other. That always takes time, regardless of how small the file might be.

When using two of the same machines, one as workstation, and one as the render slave, rendering on the slave alone will always take more time than rendering on the workstation alone, when the slave is a better machine, then it depends on the scene (a two-minute frame might add some seconds due to transfer, but the faster machine might render it in one minute…results in a shorter rendertime [2min against 1min+some sec]; a two-second frame adds some seconds for transfer and the faster machine renders it in one second…hardly efficient [2sec agaist 1sec + some sec];)).

To decide if a netrender would be efficient, render one frame on one of the the network machines and one on the workstation. Then devide the rendertime of the network by the rendertime of your workstation. If the result is smaller than the number of machines in your farm, do a netrender ;).

#4

SoLiTuDe: I did take into account of the loading of max, but im talking about individual frames…not just from the beginning…across the whole render.

Piflik: hmmm…data transfer may make it take longer, but surely there is a big difference between a few minutes and a couple of seconds.

the actual rendering on the faster (network) machine is slower (when u watch the buckets dance over the screen) and JUST in the black areas.
this has to be a backburner issue

#5

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