Vray/Deadline. Single frame rendered by several machines, possible ?

Deadline
1

Hello,

I'd like to know if Deadline can manage the rendering of one single frame by several computers across the network (vray plugin or maya plugin with vray as renderer).

I've carefully read the manual and the FAQ but it seems that Deadline doesn't allow buckets distribution but sends instead one -full- frame by computer.

Thanks.

R.S.

 

 

2

Very interesting question. I have same question :slight_smile:

But as i now deadline can not do it. But y ou can youse Vray Distrebiut Render to do it. But only 10 PC can be yoused in Vray 1 frame render .

3

I'm using vray maya beta. With the command line and the standalone version of vray I can distribute the rendering of one frame across the network, no problem.

But using a tool like Deadline just make the things easier when you you want to queue jobs.

I haven't eard of any limitation in term of number of computer using vray and distributed rendering. I'm going to ask to Vlado about this.

Thanks.

R.S. 

4

Hi Robert,



Deadline doesn’t support distributed rendering natively. Instead, we

have a “Tile Rendering” feature, which uses the region rendering

capabilities of the renderers to send different regions of a frame to

different machines. Currently, this is only supported by 3dsmax, XSI,

and Maya (and not every Maya renderer is supported at this time, and

unfortunately that includes vray).



We haven’t checked out the latest beta version of vray for Maya yet. If

the command line rendering supports region rendering, we can definitely

look at supporting tile rendering for vray in the future.



Cheers,

5
Hello Ryan,
 
Unfortunatly, Vray Maya beta doesn't support region rendering.
 
But I don't understand why Deadline doesn't support DR.
With Vray standalone (the one given with Vray Maya beta) it is really easy to distribute a rendering across the network and I guess it wouldn't be a big deal to add the function to the deadline vray plugin...
 
B.R.
R.
 
 
6

We’ve attempted to support DR in the past, and discovered that our

current architecture isn’t designed well for it. When Deadline looks at

a job, it sees each task as a frame (or group of frames) to render. With

a DR job, there would be only one frame (which means only one task), so

essentially the slaves need to dequeue the same task, which is illegal

in our architecture.



There is the idea that a DR job could be a special type of job. You

would specify the number of slaves you want to render with, and a task

would be created for each slave. The slave would dequeue a task and

become part of the DR group for that job. The machine you submitted from

could act as the master (or perhaps the slave that dequeues task 1 could

be the master), and the slaves would start up DR in slave mode so that

they communicate directly with the master machine. When the frame is

done, the slave machines will have to figure this out and kill the DR

process so they can return to dequeuing jobs normally again.



However, our current architecture doesn’t support this type of special

job yet, and integrating DR into Deadline in it’s current state probably

wouldn’t work all that well. I hope this makes sense. If you have any

more questions, please let us know!



Cheers,

7

I test alot of Render Mangment software. And there is no solution for Rened MAnageres to do DR. Like Royal Render , PipeLine. With Vray it’s very easy to do DR. In all my nodes i have alway run Vray and all team can youse it always , but only 10 nodes.

It will be wery good if you will add DR function in software.

Thanks.

8

Hi guys, I was able to get DR to work by modifying the vray plugin a bit

by adding the -distributed, -renderHost and -portNumber flags in the plugin.

[…]
renderarguments += " -numThreads=" + GetPluginInfoEntryWithDefault( “Threads”, “0” ).strip()
renderarguments += " -imgFile="" + GetPluginInfoEntry( “OutputFilename” ).strip() + “”"
renderarguments += " -imgWidth=" + GetPluginInfoEntryWithDefault( “Width”, “640” ).strip()
renderarguments += " -imgHeight=" + GetPluginInfoEntryWithDefault( “Height”, “480” ).strip()
renderarguments += " -distributed=1"
renderarguments += " -renderhost=192.168.20.135;192.168.20.136"
renderarguments += " -portNumber=20207"
[…]

Now Simply adding thesse flag as option in the vray plugin, one could edit the render host used via the Monitor. Of course it is best that Deadline Slave is not running on the DR slave, and it is best that each job using different DR slave. And since deadline can’t manage that… and I don’t see how it could… this is a manual thing.

But it can work with some simple edits of the plugin file and manual machine management

9

in fact I just though about it and it might be possible to code a DR setup. From the top of my head.

  1. Create a file listing all DR slave
  2. At the start of render instead of getting the DR machine from the job options, try to find slave from the file listing
  3. Edit the file listing making the selected nodes not available
  4. add these host to the command line
  5. at the end of render edit the file listing again setting the machine available to be picked up by another job using DR

This should be too difficult to code… i’m thinking of trying to do this myself

10

Hi!
Does anybody use 3DS Max + Vray DR and Deadline together? If yes, please tell me how.
I have 2 machines:
“First” ---- Started Slave (job with DR settings on)
“Second” ---- Started Vray Spawner

On 1st machine there are only buckets named as “First”. On 2nd computer Spawner load processor only for a minute and after it stay as a process with 0% of processor’s time.

Is Deadline allow buckets distribution or not yet?

Thanks!

Serge

11

Hi Serge,

Currently, Deadline does not support Max+Vray DR. We support Tile Rendering with 3dsmax, which should work with the VRay renderer. If you are submitting from within 3dsmax, there is a Tiles tab that you can setup a tile rendering job with.

Cheers,

  • Ryan