Using VirtualRender for animation on farm?

[Jahun]

Anyone that can shed some light on the way VirtualRender works together with Kray on an animation using a renderfarm?

I suppose there is no shared GI file in this case? So no speed gain... or is there?

Any info would be great... lil tutorial ?
Thanks!

[silverlw]

I can't tell you anything since i havent run Virtualrender. The author of Virtualrender havent given us any betas to test together with Kray.

[Jahun]

Hmm.. that's too bad. Perhaps he should

Might help sales too, if people can read if and how it works...

[TrueArt Support]

Erwin Zwart was rendering Pavlov's animation with shared GI on his 60 machines and they looked exactly the same like reference image sequence. I was rendering too (camera flying in this room http://www2.trueart.pl/Products/Plug-In ... 00_467.jpg), no problem, whatsoever.

[Jahun]

Hmm interesting, but was that with a premade and shared GI file, or can that be made/updated on the fly in a single pass?

[TrueArt Support]

Hmm interesting, but was that with a premade and shared GI file, or can that be made/updated on the fly in a single pass?

When you have animation scene, not still frame, Kray invisibly goes through entire animation gathering information where camera will fly in 10,100,1000th frame (similar to dynamics Calculate button). User doesn't see it, because Kray does not call refreshing interface function, but it knows about it! So, shared GI generated on one machine is ready and available for many rendering machines that will just read it (shared GI Load mode), and they can render in random frame order (like it happens usually with BNR and Erwin's 60 machines - some are faster, some slower, and after a while everything is mixed).

Conclusion- render static 1st frame on the fastest machine in shared GI mode Save. Then change mode to Load, save scene and put it in renderfarm. Everything will be all right..

[erwin zwart]

User doesn't see it, because Kray does not call refreshing interface function, but it knows about it! Conclusion- render static 1st frame on the fastest machine in shared GI mode Save. Then change mode to Load, save scene and put it in renderfarm. Everything will be all right..

Actually, the user can see the cursor go very fast through the frames of the time bar in LW. This is only necesary for Lightmap mode of kray, in Photonmap mode in a static scene the irradiance cache is made for the complete scene, also in areas where the camera never will come. This is a good thing but can be dangerous because it eats many photons away from the areas that the camera in this shot will see. For a smaller scene I use Photonmap (f.e. the gallery animation of the "fryrender" room"

Virtualrender is a great addition to kray and LW and makes kray for me into a production tool, coupled with BNR on my farm. Make scenes at daytime, render them in batch at night!
Next holy grail will be a way to use many nodes to generate the cache instead of one machine or generate a cache for every frame by all the nodes and be able to use "Time interpolation" on the farm to have animated non-static light solutions possible to share.

Great times for LW GI people!