Sharing render load

Olli.

Ive been rendering a certain 600 frame scene for about a week non-stop and i'm getting a little fed up.

Currently I'm rendering using my 2500K 4.4ghz, and I'm wondering if it would be possible to share the rendering load somehow. I have a fairly decent GPU (Geforce 570) and also another computer composed of my old computer parts (core 2 duo 3.5ghz, Radeon 3850)

would it be in any way possible to harness all this unused power?

monster

The easiest thing to do is have Max install on all 3 computers and open the scene and tell it to render a certain batch of frames.

A more complex method is to use a Backburner to submit render jobs to your network and have all the computers render frames or buckets of the image. This is probably more trouble than it's worth.

As far as your GPU, Mental Ray iRay will use the GPU, but not Mental Ray.

Olli.

well currently im rendering using just scanline with light tracer. I didnt really consider if the renderer im using had any impact on the render time.. which was probably a mistake.

Ace-Angel

Nope, CPU bound I'm afraid, so there isn't really anything else you can do, unless as Monster, said, use iRay, which is silver only as far as quality goes while Mental Ray is gold (if you get my gist).

The best solution is batch rendering, I did this not too long ago on 2 PC's, I basically divided my animation into frames of a 50-100, and saved them out one after another, I put a copy of each file on two USB drives and put each one on a PC with Max installed.

I then started the render process, for example, PC1 would render file 1, which was frame 1-100, while PC 2 rendered file 2 which was from 101-200. If PC2 finished it's batch before PC1, I would start on the file 3 and PC1 would get file 4 once it's time comes.

I was done with my render in about 3 hours or less this way, if your Burner is setup, you can do this without the extra dilly dally, but I could never figure out Burner.

Good Luck either way, hope you're not doing the render too close to a deadline ;P

EDIT: Ouch, scanline is a bit a gamble, in some cases it's slower then Mental-Ray, pending on what you're doing with it.

Olli.

well i have raytraced shadows from 1 omni light, 1 no shadows omni, skylight for AO, 14,300 polygon object sub-d'd x3 to 228,200 polygons.

I think the raytraced shadows is what scanline is choking on.

Mark Dygert

Ditch the raytraced shadows try to get it done with shadow map if you can. Raytraced shadows are super accurate but take forever, especially if you add a blur to the shadow it slows down to a crawl.

Ditch the skylight use a skydome instead. They give roughly the same results in a fraction of the time. With a skylight it will put a global light source over your entire scene so the bigger the scene the longer its going to take. You could have 2 boxes and if they are miles apart its going to take a while to render. Put them closer together and its going to render faster. Of course it works off of raytracing also for shadows and AO so its going to slow things down even more.

Also you can adjust the Ambient light color from black to another lighter color to globally lighten shadows, found in: Rendering > Environment > Ambient Color.

monster

The scanline renderer isn't multicore enabled. So you're only using 1/4 of your processor. There are a couple of technical hurdles switching to Mental Ray ( mainly figuring out lighting and exposure ), but it's worth it.

DeadlyFreeze

monster wrote: »

The scanline renderer isn't multicore enabled. So you're only using 1/4 of your processor.

huh? Are you talking about multi cores over a network? Scanline will definitely use all cores on a multi core cpu.

monster

DeadlyFreeze wrote: »

huh? Are you talking about multi cores over a network? Scanline will definitely use all cores on a multi core cpu.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=6852402&postcount=5

I guess there are elements of scanline that are multithreaded. In my case, I was rendering 30 minutes of high poly talking head close ups with simple materials, and that seems to be the exact situation scanline will only use one processor. That's why I was under the impression it was only single threaded.

In any case Mental Ray will take better advantage of all cores.

Ace-Angel

Yep, it's true, in some cases Scanline will be slower when compared to Mental-Ray.

I can vouch for this, uptil today I feel the pain of having to bum rush a project of mine in post-work because I didn't use MR and it took twice as long to render.

Olli.

yeah i did a test and with all the same settings, except added some shadow blur in mental ray, it took 2 minutes to render a frame that took scanline about 10 minutes.. but in any case, i finished my render