Working remotely (reduce lag)

[Dalton Watts]

I'm curious to know how do you guys work remotely.

Currently, I have the simplest method by using Teamviewer on my home computer and office computer, but, as you may know, lag is an issue especially when modeling. Not to mention the fact that sometimes shortcuts stop working randomly (W move tool is a prime example).

Would seriously like to know how can one reduce lag as much as possible when working remotely. Been hearing about VPN but I have no idea how to set it up.

[Juraj]

I've been latently interested in this too for years.

Now VPN just allows for using Window's native Remote desktop connection instead of 3rd party app (like Teamviewer) which in my opinion is the fastest option (RDC not TM) but that is in no way fast enough either.
I use it through 10gbit home network and I wouldn't call it exactly smooth...so it's definitely not going to be smooth over much worse internet access.

Not easy to become digital nomad on Borneo with all the stuff we need for CGI : /

[Dalton Watts]

Will have to try out VPN and RDC.

There's a similar topic over at ChaosGroup forums: https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/v-ray-for-3ds-max-forums/v-ray-for-3ds-max-general/1036875-working-remotely

Besides using VPN and RDC, Lele suggests: "*unless* one change is made to viewports: progressive refinement *has* to be turned off." I assume he's referring to Improve Quality Progressively on Viewport Configuration.

[jms.lwly]

I found that RDC didn’t utilise the remote PCs graphics card at all (I think because it’s natively built into Windows, the OS knows that the GPU isn’t in use) - whereas Teamviewer seemed to still utilise all the hardware, provides you have a monitor or HDMI single attached.

Obviously Corona doesn’t need the GPU, but even for viewport speed I found it made a difference.

[FrostKiwi]

I found that RDC didn’t utilise the remote PCs graphics card at all (I think because it’s natively built into Windows, the OS knows that the GPU isn’t in use) - whereas Teamviewer seemed to still utilise all the hardware, provides you have a monitor or HDMI single attached.

Obviously Corona doesn’t need the GPU, but even for viewport speed I found it made a difference.

Window's remote Desktop:
It does use your graphics card and is currently the best integrated remote tool in windows. (Open up the task manager and drag a window around, you'll see quite a chunk for GPU usage). Nothing currently beats it in latency vs Quality.
The thing is, it does not expose the GPU in the classical way.
DirecX is not affected by this. OpenGL is - which is why it breaks many professional applications. The reason is a combo of Microsoft and Graphics Driver Teams being stubborn aholes. There are workarounds by the way, of which I wrote up a bunch here.
3dsMax is btw unaffected and runs just fine.

VNC as a protocol is really not meant for low latency work. The most low latency implementation is TightVNC with's encoding + Jpeg and it updates only the inside of the window and not everything by default. Very neat, but it is still beat by Window's remote quick quality scaling and pretty smart "progressive updates".

There is also NX, which uses Video compression techniques and is the goto in *nix world and replaces VNC in terms of speed, but RDP is still faster on windows.

I have never used TeamViewer but from what I understand is that it routes the images through their servers, which would obviously kill latency, though I may be worong.

And of course, nothing of any of this matters if you have a bad upload speed. Then you won't have a good experience no matter what. My 10mbit upload is barely enough to work with 3dsMax with acceptable levels of jank.

[Charlie Nicols]

VPN and windows Remote Dekstop are your best alternatives before using Citrix/VMware/Teradici.

After setting up your VPN the next thing to do would be to test your network / network latency, overall unless you have a solid connection <10ms lat to your remote computer and a stable 20+MB's with two internet lines, one for internet use and one solely for your VPN/Remote connection then you will not have great performance. Lag, artifacts ect.

Also you will not be able to run programs such as Sketchup without the use of some special scripts to trick session ID ect. 

Remote Desktop is obviously a good free alternative but you will never reach the performance of paid alternatives like Citrix however these are very expensive to set up.