Meelis 25 March 2009 10:00 AM

MatthiasGose 25 March 2009 09:33 AM

Hi Mark,

If you have a lots of maps, shaders etc in your scene, you have to make them available to your satellites.

Interesthing thought. How is this done the most effective way? Just copying the total local file structure to get mr to use it on satellites?

Regards Matthias

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C2Q 9650, 8GB Ram
3dsmax 8, 2009, 2010 and 2011

MatthiasGose 25 March 2009 10:29 AM

Interesthing thought. How is this done the most effective way? Just copying the total local file structure to get mr to use it on satellites?

Use network location for your maps & material libraries and always create new ones there. Once done your master PC do not have to send any of them to satellites (if you have Distributed Maps box checked) therefore it saves render time and if you create new files all machines immediately are able to start using them. So no additional copies in the future.

First tried out DBR with 3Ds Max 2009 yesterday and results with a demo scene were very good. Although it was not possible to use the full CPU of the first satellite single frame and animations rendered okay.
The problems started when rendering the full scene that also uses two plugins (Cebas FinalDOF and Archvision RPC). At first the blocks from the satellite had different colors and some areas did not seem to render at all and stayed as gray blocks. Also crashes happened randomly and when the main machine exceeded 4GB of RAM.

What I did not try yet was using full UNC paths as mentioned before - instead a mapped network location on the satellite that matched the fixed drive letter on the main machine.
Also the architecture of the satellite is AMD while the main machine runs an Intel quadcore. But could the different architectures really influence the render output that much ?