Hi there,
We would like to hear from people who have tried rendering from 3dsmax using the AWS system in deadline10.
We are wondering how easy it is to setup, particularly regarding licenses (3dsmax, vray, corona?) and also wether this approach is any cheaper than a dedicated render farm such as Rebusfarm
best
Jonas
Hi Jonas,
We have done quite a lot of things now on AWS with 3dsmax/Corona/Vray - It’s been really helpful to be able to scale when things get busy.
The setup is fairly easy (read the docs and watch the tut videos) - I didn’t have any experience with AWS before setting it up, but I know my way around it now and you know what to look out for if something goes wrong.
Once all the backend account stuff is setup, I just take the deadline base image on AWS and install 3dsmax/Corona/Vray and any other misc plugins. Once thats done you just make it a proper image for your account (this is what the slaves get started up with.)
License forwarding is easy for vray (you just tell it to point to the gateway in the asset server), but Corona was a bit more picky - you have to tell it to point to the gateway that is started from Deadline, and do some auth token thing. I usually have to fiddle with this Corona bit as it likes to throw up errors and locks out new slaves that try to render…
Once all that is done, just get your RCS running and make sure all the services are online in the Monitor before you start the infrastructure.
We have found that getting 10-15 c5.18xlarge nodes is better than trying to manage loads of cheaper ones.
Once it’s all running, you just sub the job from the Deadline monitor. (I have an event script that catches the group it is assigned to, which then adds the deadline and 3dsmax limits - these limits are for the on demand credits you buy for on the thinkbox marketplace)
Barring any problems, the slaves should just get on with rendering the job, then dump the files back into whatever save location specified in the 3dsmax job - no need for vpns or anything else. Basically if a render comes back from one slave right, the rest of the job will be correct.
The only thing I haven’t figured out yet is sending files with xrefs attached, as it doesn’t seem to find them and remap paths - so everything is sent merged.
It isn’t cheap though when running slaves with windows! - It will be more cost effective for us when Corona standalone comes out on Linux (as those instances are 3x cheaper than windows ones)
I find it a lot better than sending jobs to Rebus etc, as you have more control over the rendering (and you don’t have to faff with collecting all files and uploading all the time - Deadline does it for you)
Hope that is somewhat informative for you!
Cheers,
-jaime
Hello Jaime,
As I am right now in a process of deciding of what rendering infrastructure to use, I was hoping if you would be open for a help.
I do see you as an experienced user of 3Ds Max + Corona on AWS and it would be incredible kind of you if we could somehow connect.
Is there a way we could get in touch? My email is jakub@jakubcech.net.
Thank you for letting me know.
Jakub
Hey guys,
So, i am also looking into cloud render to support our on-prem render farm. I have started with Azure Batch, coz we have all of assets and models already in Azure cloud.
But i am also intressted in comparing to AWS, so i was really happy when i found this tread.
A quick question, using vray, do you know if is possible to to use Distrubeted rendering, or it´s always down to one machine to do the render? I ask this coz we have render @ 4K and above, sometimes really complex scenes and it would take forever to render on one machine only.
@JakubCech sent you an email.
@carp The AWS slaves should fire up the vray dr servers just like in a normal network situation.
I had a problem with it using the 3dsmaxio version that was part of the Deadline base images, but once I installed a normal 3dsmax version it worked fine.
Well, that the part i dont really get / understand. Sure, i can use the submitt a VRDBR job to deadline. But then it just spinns upp a bunch of machines wit rayspawner, and tries to connect them to my machine´s DR.
What i would like is to hade one Cloud slave, with a bunch of connected vray render helpers…
AWS Portal will not work with V-Ray DBR out of the box because the proper networking will not be in place. V-Ray DBR is a master/client system that requires access to an ip/port.
We do have V-Ray DBR Off-load which can allow you to remove your local host from the render process.
You will need to make sure that the AWS security groups for the slaves are set with proper port configuration to allow connections to the master.
You may also be able to use your local host as a master but you would need to setup port forwarding using our BYOL functionality to make this work. This allows you to forward a local ip and port.
As an alternative to DBR have you looked at Tile Render or Jigsaw as a solution for distributing your large single frames?
Regards,
Charles
Hi there guys, is there any guide step by step to run AWS with Corona Render? We want to try it at the studio but we couldnt find any info. Thanks in Advance