Distributed Bucket Rendering

[mkoutsky]

I am running 3DS MAX Design 2010 64 bit on a Core 2 Quad Q9300 @ 2.5GHz with 16 GB of Ram with a Nvidia Quadro FX 1700 video card. I have set up a distributed bucket rendering farm for a large still image. It requires to be printed 24 x 36 and high resolution. Whenever it renders on a single machine it finishes, however, it takes 8 days to complete. Using the net render it gets to 1.2% and crashes. Do you have any suggestions to make the net render more stable, or to speed up the rendering on a single machine. If we are rendering at 300DPI what is a suitable image size to render. Any help to speed this process up would be helpful. Thank you!

[stusic]

To print a 24"x36" image at 300dpi, you'd need to render the image at 7200 pixels x 10,800 pixels.

Can you post the render settings, either by listing them or a screenshot?

Do you have problems rendering smaller jobs on your farm?

[mkoutsky]

We have no problem rendering smaller images. My render settings are 5400 x 8100 at 300DPI.

[stusic]

Can't read the render setting in the screenshot, but 8 days seems like a lot - even for a large image.

*EDIT*
You said you don't have problems rendering smaller images - is that when rendering on your farm?

[mkoutsky]

Rendering farm is ok on small images, but slower than single machine. The render settings are:
image precision - High
Final Gather - High
Glossy Reflections - 2.0X High Quality
Glossy Refractions - 2.0X High Quality

FG Bounces - 3

[Steve_Bennett]

Your machine you use to do most of your design sounds like a sweet setup.

Do the other machines have the same amount of RAM on them? If not, they will choke when assigned to help on the job.

The system used to originate the job will set the amount of data to process based on the available amount of RAM. 3ds MAX assumes all other systems on the farm have the same amount of RAM. If they have less, then they don't have enough to finish the job.

[Steve_Bennett]

Also, are you using Distributed Bucket Rendering (DBR) via the Render Setup Dialog?
OR
Using Backburner to process the image?

I've heard that Backburner can provide greater stability than DBR.