Distributed render Slow slave loading

[Lucas Rodrigues]

Hello how are you ?
I looked for FOrum some answer about my question and I did not find it.
I have 2 computers on the network for rendering, I'm realizing that the slave computer takes a while to start helping render, is this common?

[Frood]

Yes. Master has to save the scene first and send it to the slaves, slaves have to load the scene + assets + prepare the scene before they can start to contribute. This may take a while, depending on the scene.


Good Luck

[maru]

What Frood wrote. Plus starting 3ds Max, etc...

What are the specific times you are getting? How much slower is it on the node than on the workstation?

[Frood]

Plus starting 3ds Max

Oh, those times are over :)


Good Luck

[maru]

Plus starting 3ds Max

Oh, those times are over :)

You are right, but it can still add to the overall time. ;)

[Lucas Rodrigues]

Yes. Master has to save the scene first and send it to the slaves, slaves have to load the scene + assets + prepare the scene before they can start to contribute. This may take a while, depending on the scene.


Good Luck

Thank :)

[Lucas Rodrigues]

What Frood wrote. Plus starting 3ds Max, etc...

What are the specific times you are getting? How much slower is it on the node than on the workstation?

It takes 1 to 2 minutes to start rendering on the slaves, which makes me sad because I'm optimizing the scene to have 3 minutes of rendering, so each slave only helps in rendering for 1 minute.
There is no way to make it faster.

Or if you use rendering managers as deadlines, can that be resolved?

[Frood]

I'm optimizing the scene to have 3 minutes of rendering

This sounds like animation?

Or if you use rendering managers as deadlines, can that be resolved?

Yes, if you do animation, scrap DR. Use Backburner or Deadline (one frame, one node) instead.


Good Luck

[Lucas Rodrigues]

I understood, so the DR of the corona is more efficient in Still, for animation the Backburner is better?

[Frood]

Yes. You just have to understand that DR and Backburner are different concepts of network/distributed rendering.

In case of animation, Backburner is more a kind of "batch rendering manager" with the benefit that scenes+assets are loaded only once per node (they just switch timeline when changing to another frame instead of reloading the whole thing. Here is potential for improving Corona DR btw.). So Backburner should be your first (no charge) choice when it comes to animation frames.

In case of stills, I would not recommend to use Backburner as distributed (! meaning processing one frame on multiple nodes) render solution because you would have to use its strip rendering system, which may cause issues using any postproduction features of Corona. So yes, Corona DR is the choice for rendering distributed stills.

Of course it is fine to submit your 4k stills to Backburner (without strips) for overnight rendering though, because it then also just does a one frame on one node processing. And you could even mix both, Corona DR and Backburner by sumbitting a job to one node in Backburner while having Corona DR slaves assigned in the scene.


Good Luck