I have finally been able to install SolidWorks 2013 on my render farm this weekend. Starting to test some of the new network rendering capabilities.
Here is what 11 machines (168 threads) working on a large format, single frame render looks like. Sweet......
Scene file courtesy of Rob Rodriquez.
Cheers,
Anna
Anna,
Nice! Can you give us some of the details on the rendering speed and % of increased speed per additional machine. I know modo only uses about 30% for each machine when I last used it and does not use it on the entire render process. Can you comment on these details for SW 2013?
Thanks,
Jonathan
Jonathan,
I will over the coming weeks. I need to do more experimenting with SolidWorks implementation of Modo network rendering.
I just installed it last night and set up one large format frame to run to see if it works. I had issues in beta with licensing on SNL servers so could not do any testing.
Modo will use 100% of the cpu's on each machine for the buckets in my experience. However with that said, there are losses due to the overhead of tracking the buckets rendered by each machine and the transfer of the data to/from each render node. There is a point of diminishing returns and that is greatly dependent on how long the rendering process takes.
I render a lot of large format frames in Modo that take many hours per frame. The more render nodes I can through at the rendering the better. If the frames are less the 30 minutes the latency of the whole process has a greater impact as you add more machines.
The GI passes at the beginning of each frame are run on a single machine. If the GI passes take a long time to process it is best to have your fastest machine with the most cores be the master/coordinator machine to minimize the time of processing the GI passes.
There are a lot of considerations. Will take several blog posts to work through some of the thought processes I use for setting up large format frames.
Cheers,
Anna
I did a quick test and give a brief overview in this video. Anna will have much more in depth info I'm sure.
Thanks Anna. Impressive!
I will setup a farm in the training room to test this functionality.