timmwagener Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 Hey guys, i just found out, that it's possible to let several machines render on the same frame over the network with Mantra, similiar to VRay Distributed Rendering for example. I tested it out and it seems to work. The render statistics explicitly list the different machines and their contribution in percent. One thing though seems a little strange: I encounter no performance boost. Instead of doing more work in the same timeframe, Mantra seems to just distribute the existing work. The satelites, as well as my own machine, dont run at 100% but at 30% instead. If i turn of -H, my machine runs at 100% again. I have "Use Max Processors" turned on. Also tested around with the tiled render options.... Anybody any ideas? A VRay DR equivalent in Mantra sounds pretty awesome Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Georgie Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 Hey, new here and not at all knowledgeable but a quick google search gave me this ; http://odforce.net/wiki/doku.php?id=mantraremoterendering Hope that helps ;3 Cheers Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timmwagener Posted July 11, 2014 Author Share Posted July 11, 2014 Thx, cool infos there! But let me give you some pictures to clarify my issue: Mantra rendering locally. All available CPU power is used: Mantra rendering on 2 slaves and the localhost. Each machine renders, but only with 30% power... So in effect i'm gettin the job done in the same time, just much more relaxed for each machine. What i would expect instead is to get the job done about 3 times faster... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 Which Houdini version? What are you rendering? -H has been good on OsX versions. Ie Expected speed up happened. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timmwagener Posted July 11, 2014 Author Share Posted July 11, 2014 (edited) Houdini 13.0.401 I'm testing with PBR as render engine. System Specs: Platform: windows-x86_64-cl17 Operating System: Windows 7 Service Pack 1 x64 (6.1.7601) Number of Cores: 32 Physical Memory: 63.96 GB OpenGL Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation OpenGL Renderer: Quadro K5000/PCIe/SSE2 OpenGL Version: 4.3.0 OpenGL Shading Language: 4.30 NVIDIA via Cg compiler Viewport Render Version: GL 3.3 Detected: NVidia Professional 4096 MB 320.57.0.0 Edited July 11, 2014 by timmwagener Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 Can you post readout when you increase the verbosity? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted July 12, 2014 Share Posted July 12, 2014 My guess is that there's extra locking involved in the distributed communication that nullifies the benefits for your particular scene. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timmwagener Posted July 14, 2014 Author Share Posted July 14, 2014 Hey guys, Can you post readout when you increase the verbosity? here are the logs: With and without -H. Here is the scene. My guess is that there's extra locking involved in the distributed communication that nullifies the benefits for your particular scene. What exactly do you have in mind there? Other distributed services, like VRay DR for example, are running well within the network. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted July 15, 2014 Share Posted July 15, 2014 all fine here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timmwagener Posted July 15, 2014 Author Share Posted July 15, 2014 (edited) Hmm, ok...will test it on additional scenes soon. Would be very useful if it worked over here Edited July 15, 2014 by timmwagener Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timmwagener Posted July 16, 2014 Author Share Posted July 16, 2014 Hey guys, now i'm encountering another issue. I have a scene which only consists of Alembic files and a super simple material (just a shader builder and a surfacemodel) and when network rendering i'm getting visible tiles in all AOVs. Any ideas? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted July 16, 2014 Share Posted July 16, 2014 that most likely means one of your hosts isn't rendering - additionally you may have to restart hserver. Just try Mantra -H on each individual host to see which one is failing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timmwagener Posted July 17, 2014 Author Share Posted July 17, 2014 Thx marty! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kardonn Posted August 8, 2014 Share Posted August 8, 2014 I've noticed this at our offices since switching to H13 from 12.5. Distributed rendering used to be a huge performance gain, but now it seems to only use 8 of the 32 threads on my workstation, and I believe was hitting threading limits on the hosts as well. I haven't dug into it to find out what the issue is, but rest assured, you are not crazy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dennis.albus Posted August 8, 2014 Share Posted August 8, 2014 Try to use the newest production build. There's been a recent fix for distributed rendering which will use all available threads and not just 8. We are getting the expected speed gains. Some tips for distributed rendering to make it work better: - if possible don't use the preview mode as that seems to break more often and forces you to restart rendering alltogether - disable auto-update and refresh the rendering by hand ONLY when the rendering (or region) is done completely - don't use an excessive number of remote hosts as this also fails more often There are also some tips when working with alembics that might speed up the workflow: - when using an alembic SOP the ifd generation and startup time for the rendering is quicker, but the geometry has to be updated each time you make a shader change which might take a long time and is a workflow breaker - when loading the alembic as a node hierarchy the ifd generation takes longer but shader assignments, light tweaks etc. will be updated immediately - be sure to not tweak your render settings once and then leave it as that also forces a full restart of the rendering - when working on shading netwoks i found that creating new nodes and rewiring stuff only forces a recompile and then updates immediately in the rendering. When you copy and paste nodes however this forces a full restart of the rendering. These are my experiences and I am curious to hear others. Cheers, Dennis Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
katisss Posted May 2, 2015 Share Posted May 2, 2015 (edited) hi, We are running in some network errors with mantra dr on linux. http://odforce.net/wiki/doku.php?id=mantraremoterendering has been helpful but we still get 30s connection time out and other errors mostly if we need to start the hserver on clients first. Is there any way to change the timeout mantra tries to connect to -H clients? Whats the best way to debug this? Is there a way to see (in ip for example) how mant clients were sucessfully connected? Thanks for your help Edited May 2, 2015 by katisss Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.