Distributed VRay Rendering

[irneb]

Somehow we've got a problem when performing this in 3dsMax 2010. It appears as if the 2nd (and other) workstations used in the distributed render simply cannot find the proxies and / or JPG's.

E.g. Say we've got model X saved on a server share, in folder S:\Project#\X.MAX. We place all the proxies and JPGs used in that model in the same folder. Then each PC is mapped to the server using the exact same drive letter. So you'd expect that if one can find al those files, any other could too. Well they do, we can open the MAX file from any of the PCs and it would render correctly if we don't use distributed render.

For some reason doing a VRay distributed render simply doesn't do this. You either end up with a render where the buckets rendered from the slave(s) are only showing the model as a white plastic and discarding any proxies, or if you check the "Check for unfound files" option only the master PC does the rendering. This is really upsetting, we've tried all different variants: using a full url instead of a drive letter, sharing a folder from the master PC directly, etc.

But from a collogue firm we see them simply have the folder with these files on a local (non shared) workstation - although this sounds highly illogical to me, it runs perfectly for them. Anyone know what I could be doing wrong? It seems stupid having to copy each of these files into 3ds's support folders on each PC - every project could have several variants of the same file, modified to suit that particular purpose. Which means you'd have to copy the files to each PC you want to use for rendering every time you render, just so you are certain to use the correct version of the file throughout.

[Cad64]

I don't use Vray, and apparently no one else here does either, but maybe this will help: http://vray.info/tutorials/vray_distributed_rendering_and_backburner/

[thhm]

i know this is an old thread, but maybe it can help somebody. Had this same problem before, it was really annoying so we just shifted to a backburner setup in the office, which was more reliable. anyways, i wanted to give it another shot after a long time (using 3ds max 2012 now with vray 2.0 , windows 7 sp1) and was pleasantly suprised that it now works as advertised!:D

we just ticked "convert file paths to UNC" in max settings of all machines. Didnt even have to keep the maps in a separate server machine, just shared the "maps" folder of the main render machine to "everyone". hope this helps.

[irneb]

The original problem happened in 3ds 2010 + VRay 1.5, haven't tried 2012 + 2.0 yet.

We've done the URL setting, we've done a folder share from the master PC (with full access to all), we've had a server with share on full access to all. No go whatsoever. The only way we could "make" this work was to copy each and every material / JPG / proxy to each and every PC's 3ds support folders manually.

We DO NOT want to use BACKBURNER. We want to render ONE HUGE image QUICKLY. Something that takes 3 days to render for one image, takes around 5 hours with enough slaves in VRay. With backburner, that same image would still take 3 days - it just means you can send several images to separate slave PC's for render over there. Our work is usually making photo-realistic renderings for print onto A1/A0 sheets at 300DPI - which means the renders take LONG for each single image. Thus BackBurner is less than useless to us. VRay is one which splits a single render image to multiple slaves so the single render finishes faster, but without materials mapping to the slaves this is just stupid.