AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

WAN RenderFarm

Deadline
#1

Hi,
I’ve just been testing Deadline, and I must say I am most impressed. I do however have a few questions.



Firstly, I am attempting to use this over a VPN made up of several computers all on reasonable internet connections. I would like to know, when using Deadline with Softimage XSI, how exactly is scene data dealt with by the clients for rendering.



I currently have copied my entire project to the Repository, opened, and submitted with the output path of the render pics also to the repository.



I would like to know, that if I am subbmitting jobs in smaller chunks, say 5 frames at a time, will it require the clients to downloading the required scene files/textures/shaders every 5 frames, or does it keep this stored locally after the first time its downloaded it so it may use the same data for the next chunks it does.



Or… does it download required scene data fresh for every single frame?



If it is currently downloading every frame, I would like to know if there is anyway I can have each client use a a local directory for the scene data its rendering from. This way I could distribute the scene via ftp or something throughout all the clients that will be processing it, prior to them rendering.



Obviously running this over the internet, bandwidth usage is of concern. Its worked very nicely so far on some small test scenes with 2-3 1mb textures



thanks


#2

Hi Rob,



Our XSI license dongle had an unfortunate accident, but a new one is on

its way. When we get it, we’ll try to reproduce the problem and

hopefully come up with a solution. We’ll keep you posted.



Cheers,

#3

I fixed this shortly after posting… at least if I manually path to the plugin after booting xsi64 it loads fine. It just didn’t work as described in the setup manual, putting striaght into the plugin folder and allowing xsi to automatically load the plugin. Anyway as long as it works :slight_smile:



I have edited I edit my post as above, as I had some further querys about using this software over a wide area network.


  • thanks

#4

Hi Rob,



Glad to hear that you found a workaround. We’ll still try to reproduce

the problem once we get XSI up and running again.



When Deadline initially picks up an XSI job, it copies the scene file

locally from the repository. It will keep this scene file local until it

picks up a different job, so essentially the scene file is only copied

over once per job. The textures/shaders are not copied over though,

which is why they must be network accessible.



For each task the slave renders, it has to start XSI and load the scene

(locally) and the textures/shaders (from the network). So if you have a

task which a chunk size of 5, it will start XSI and then render all 5

frames, so essentially, XSI is only started up once per task.



Cheers,

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