DrServer and Max slave odd behaviour

[marobaro]

Hi
I have been using Vray for DR (distributed rendering) and animations for years. So know it quite well.
Recently installed Corona and.. love it. (I am on first week of a demo trial) 

Already installed DrServer as service on couple of office machines and testing. All working well. At least as far as the system is meant to work, as far as I can see. But here lies a problem. Because Corona's DrServer starts a new instance of 3ds Max for each frame (and then shuts it, only to open a new one again), rendering a DR animation with let's say 2 min frame time limit, on a big scene (one that takes long to load), causes the slave machines to be almost useless. I watched the Task Manager's performance graph and it looks a bit like couple of sharks in a queue. The CPUs would rev up to 100% eventually, but only for couple of seconds, just then the frame time limit was reached, slave's Max closed and another one starts to load again..

Is that the way it's supposed to run? Forgive me comparisons, as I said I love most things about Corona and am championing its purchase for our office, but at the end it must render DR animations in a fashion that's competitive to vray for us to move production to it.

Would it be possible for Corona's DrServer to actually start a "slave" Max session in the background and keep it open regardless of whether requests for DR are sent or not? (bit like vray I suppose) 

Thank you, I hope I got something wrong and there's an obvious fix :)

Marek

[Frood]

rendering a DR animation with let's say 2 min frame time limit, on a big scene (one that takes long to load), causes the slave machines to be almost useless.

That´s right but this is a typical Backburner job (single machine rendering) in my eyes. Why use Corona dr here?

Good Luck!

[Ondra]

yes, when running multiple frames, the recommended solution is "one machine, one frame". About why Corona cannot re-use 3ds max in batch: we are pointing fingers at autodesk here. We got basically told that rendering 2 or more shots in 1 3dsmax without license (render slave mode) is violation of 3ds max licensing policy, and not technically possible. We of course pointed that V-ray does it somehow, so it is possible. So the final answer was just "violation of licensing policy". ;)

[marobaro]

Yes. Backburner is the way to go, of course.
I asked about the other route as a while ago we didn't have access to properly functioning bb so went dr route on couple of anims. With bb Corona behaves impeccably :)
Thank you.