Why use deadline for Vray DR?

Deadline
1

Hi All,

We currently have Deadline managing all our network render jobs however we are about to introduce vray into our workflow. I really like the look of Vray DR as it allows you to produce quick on-the-fly renders of the scene you are working on, utilising other render nodes. I know that you can submit a job as Vray DR in deadline, but this would mean that you wouldn’t see the render processing in the frame buffer, you would just have to keep checking for when it has finished and then open the file.

So am I missing something by not using deadline for Vray DR? Or would I just lose the live render view (very important in my opinion)?

Cheers

2

We don’t use VRay, but I don’t think this statement is accurate. I think the Vray DR job basically serves to 1) reserve a set of slaves (so that they don’t pick up other work), and 2) start VRay distributed render clients on them so that they can be used by an interactive artist session. Once the job is on the farm and slaves have picked it up, you would trigger a distributed render from your DCC application and the DR clients would render it for you.

3

Nathan is dead right on this one. Let us know if you need any further clarifications.

4
  1. once you set the job to complete the vray child processes are killed cleanly! it is a great system!
5

In the case of 3dsMax, there are 2 x types of VRay DBR supported.

  1. Interactive VRay/VRay RT DBR - see Nathan’s explanation above. Watch the DBR render on your screen.

  2. Off-load VRay DBR / Mental Ray Satellite DR - similar to the above DBR, but the ‘local’ workstation is fully off-loaded from taking part in the DBR render and instead the first task of the Deadline job (TaskId=0) will become the MASTER machine and all other tasks become ‘buckets’ to this new master machine. You would have to remote into the “TaskId=0” slave machine to view the DBR render in progress or just stream the Deadline slave log as VRay can be quite chatty.

Support to handle dynamic add/remove of more/less machines to either DBR type above once ‘rendering’ has started is currently being looked into. However, it’s a bit tricky. WIP…

6

Mike , is there an idea if this dynamic feature will be supported in 7.2 or it is planned to 8-th version ?

7

The plan is for v7.2, assuming it can be made to work correctly. The interactive in-app submitter is where it gets all a bit tricky.

8

Hi Mike,
Wanted to ask if there is an update on this feature ? Really impatient with this one ! If there is anything like beta or something - would be really happy to try that.
Cheers

9

Hi,

  1. 3dsMax in-app interactive dbr is now complete and should ship with the next beta of Deadline 8.0. Beta access via a signed NDA can be gained by sending an email to “beta [at] thinkboxsoftware [dot] com”. Only works with Max 2014 or later & VRay 3.2 or later.

  2. Next up is 3dsMax off-load dynamic dbr and then with a bit of luck, hopefully Corona will play ball as well.

10

Mike , you made my day !
These are awesome news ! We cannot test beta here though , but at least we know that this will be available in 8.0 and that is awesome !
Thanks !