Timothy Saunders

i know vray advanced and viz 2005 have some issues. after following the advice given to others on the chaos forums i took the steps mentioned there about replacing the vray dummy files with backburner files and re-naming them. after doing that i ran the vray spawner and got any error and it automatically shut down the vray spawner. my question is however, is there any reason i can't just use backburner with vray? i'm tired of this crap.

ShaunDon

Hey Tim. I've pretty much given up on V-Ray's DR until the apocryphal release of 1.5. For those who don't know, the distributive rendering controls were gutted in 1.4x for a total overhaul, only we've seen hide nor hair of the new version for what, going on 19 months? As it exists now DR is more of a hindrance as the spawners crash every other time they're engaged.

Anyway to answer your question, Backburner has been my saving grace in the past year. I distribute the rendering of all my stills now with Backburner's striping. Most of my work is using QMC for indirect light, so I just hit the render button, but if you use the light cache you'll want to precalc it on a single machine and then load the saved map when you send to Backburner. If you're using the irradiance map for first bounce, you'll probably want to precalc that too, but it's time-consuming. The precalc'ing is to avoid seams when the stripes are compiled into a final image caused by variations in the indirect light from one stripe to the next.

Hope this helps!
Shaun

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Shaun Donnelly
TANGRAM 3DS

Timothy Saunders

thanks shaun. in your comment about precalc to avoid seams when compiling, i take it you don't have this problem when using qmc secondary? i guess if backburner works with vray, i'm just trying to figure out the benefit of vray's dr (even when it does work) over backburner.

Timothy Saunders

wait and another thing, do you use qmc for both bounces? do you get good render times?

gfa2

Hey guys...I've been using Vray's DR for awhile now and I love it. I've used it on VIZ 2005, max 7 and max 8. I've only got 1 license of Vray so I can only use 10 PC's but they all have Hyper threading so I get 20 buckets rendering at the same time (man is that cool to see). I use a free program called PStools to start and stop the other 9 DR computers. I created some batch files that use PStools so I don't have to wonder around my office messing around with the other computers. The only real problems that I've had with DR is that I can't get the DR computers to read the imagemaps off of the network so I have to copy them local to each PC (batch files again, but it's kind of a pain). And on really large renderings (over 4k pixels wide) some of the buckets render darker than others...seems like a memory resource problem with Vray. If you have any specific problems let me know and I might be able to help.

Brian Cassil

What!? You mean there is something that works better in FR than Vray? Woo-Hoo!

Timothy Saunders

[quote=gfa2]I use a free program called PStools to start and stop the other 9 DR computers. I created some batch files that use PStools so I don't have to wonder around my office messing around with the other computers. The only real problems that I've had with DR is that I can't get the DR computers to read the imagemaps off of the network so I have to copy them local to each PC (batch files again, but it's kind of a pain). QUOTE]

interesting gary, so what was your trick in getting vray's dr to work so easily with viz05? did you follow those steps mentioned on the chaos forums? i tried that, but like i said earlier, after i replaced the vray dummy file into my viz root dir with one i made from running backburner. i engaged the spawner, and it instantly diplayed an error and said it was shutting down. i guess my main reason for this thread, however is to get a response from others who have tried both spawner and backburner with vray. and what i am gaining or missing by going either way. after the 15 minutes i had this afternoon to experiment with bb i figure if that works why not go with it?

kippu

Gary regarding the other computers not being able to read the imagemaps ... have you specifically mapped the shared drives on the client computers with the same drive name ..... like G: in server should be G: in the client... it worked for me

JamesTaylor

Tim,

i know its a pain to set up, but i had DR working fine on viz2005 and was very stable. I would suggest looking thro some of the forums such as chaosgroup for a detailed explanation of how to set it up, even set up Backburner and create your own vraydummy files.

Backburner is also very useful, but not as useful as DR on single images. Backburner is more suitable for animations and however you render, if your using GI and rendering across a farm you will need to precalc the irr map / light map to avoid frame flickering. if your just using a single machine you don't need to but i'd still suggest it as it should save you time.

Finally i generally use irr map for primary bounce and qmc for secondary bounces.

JamesTaylor

gary,

as mention by Kippu, mapping your networked drives properly and consistently across each machine node should remove the need to copy maps to each local machine, alternatively you could use unc paths but that may be more harssle on a large scene.

The buckets that render darker when using DR shouldn't happen, i've suffered this previously and it turned out i had different version of vray installed on different machines.....could this be your problem? After making sure i had the same version across all machines its never been a problem.

James