So I have deadline up and running for my render farm and I am able to send jobs to the farm from max using the deadline script. Now my renders seem a little slower than usual so I am wondering if there is any more options or settings that I have missed during the set up. Its probably just because the computers I have rendering aren’t that great but when I was using backburner it seemed to go faster I dunno any suggestions? Another issue I am having is the “Render To Texture” when I submit the job as a 4096 or 2048 the computer renders it out as a 256. I have double checked the settings and the render to texture and just tried rendering it out on my computer and it renders it out as what size I put it at. So why is it sending the job and then rendering it as 256?
Hi there,
Can you provide a bit more detail here? Are the individual frames being rendered slower, or is it the overall clock time for the job to finish? There is always a bit of natural startup overhead when using a render farm (ie: each machine has to start up max and load the scene), but once that stage is reached, everything should move efficiently (and the actual render times should be comparable). Is it possible to compare Deadline’s speed to what you were getting with backburner so we can get an idea of how much slower it is?
Is it possible to post a simple test scene that reproduces this problem? We’ll try it out here and see if we can reproduce. Also, which version of Max are you using?
Thanks!
- Ryan
Thanks for the quick reply, for your first response I was already thinking that it didn’t have to with deadline I just really wanted to make sure that there wasn’t any pre-setup step that I could have missed. I think the whole process of opening max and then rendering and the fact that they really aren’t the greatest rendering computers is probably why it seems so slow.
As for the render to texture I cant give out the scenes I work on but I will give you a step by step on everything Ido to set it up and hopefully you can get an idea of where I might be going wrong.
So first of all I am working on windows 7 64 bit, Max 2009 32 bit. So basically I set up the Render to texture first. I add in the object do a complete map name it and then set the map size to 2048. Now I know the render to texture set up is right just because when I hit render on that menu it renders out fine and at the right size. So after I set all of that up I go to the deadline menu and then go to misc tab, make sure the render to texture is selected and then add in the object that I want to render. Then I submit the job and it sends it out but only renders it as 256. I know it is going to be a little hard to tell what exactly is going on and I am a little confused because I know I had this working just last week, and for some reason it just started to render them out small.
So I completely forgot to let you know that for some of these renders I have been using Vray. Now here is a weird thing that just happened one of my render farms that had Vray up and running got the job and rendered it fine and saved it out as 2048. Now the only thing different from that computer and the other farms is Vray was running on that one. So could that have possibly played a factor into it rendering a 256 instead. Seems a little weird that it would still even render if Vray wasn’t up. Just a thought when I get another chance to test I will and post what I find out.
Thanks for the additional info. The VRay/RTT thing is odd, but from what you described, it sounds like a configuration issue. Maybe on the machines that vray wasn’t setup, it was rendering in a demo mode where it limited the final resolution. Anyways, just give us an update when you have one. Hopefully ensuring that vray is setup properly is all you have to do to fix this problem.
Cheers,
- Ryan
So I just had a chance to test it out and it seems like one farm is working and the others are rendering out the images as 256. So what is the demo mode? I set up all the computers the same way or so I thought do you have any ideas as to why it would be rendering in a demo mode?
I was just speaking hypothetically. I don’t know why the resolution would be changed like that, but because it works on one farm and not another, it leads me to believe that it is a configuration issue related to vray.
This is just another hypothesis, but if I recall, even though vray doesn’t use a license for network rendering, it might still need to “see” a license server. So maybe on your second farm, vray isn’t configured to find the correct license server.
On the second farm, maybe try launching 3dsmax in interactive mode on one of the render nodes and see if you can bake out the textures manually. If vray isn’t finding a license, running 3dsmax in interactive mode should make this obvious.
Cheers,
- Ryan
Now I don’t know whats going on. All my computers are working fine now except for one which I double checked it with my other computers and I made sure that the license for Vray is setup correctly and all of my paths for deadline as well. So if I come across a reason as to why it is doing this I will let you guys know.