Network rendering

[Martians]

Hi,

I have purchased 15 licenses for 3dsmax octane plugin and two stand-alone licenses for my workstations.

Submitting a job via backburner results in a "octane license not activated" message on the nodes despite the fact that I have activated the plugin licenses on all of them.

How do I activate the rendernodes properly?



Thanks...

Martin

[pixelrush]

Hmmm, well, Octane doesn't do network rendering, and you need a standalone license for each plugin.
I am not sure Octane will ever do network renders. Perhaps you didn't understand the nature of the program when you purchased. The way you get more performance out of Octane is to use multiple GPU in a pc. The renders are done on GPU not CPU. The most people manage currently is 7 GPU per pc, like Nvidia Titans, very fast, large vram capacity. You could however use multiple pc to render a batch of images on each to combine later as per an animation.
If you messed up your purchase contact Otoy guys and maybe they will let you swap some plugin licenses for standalone so you have pairs. I should tell you too since you may not be well informed at the moment Octane only runs on Nvidia GPU. Before you run out and buy GPU you best spend some time finding out whats best. Feel free to ask any questions here.

[Martians]

Many thanks for the info Pixelrush - I'm obviously very sad to hear that Octane does not support network rendering! Why does it not? I'm wondering why there are plugin licenses available without the standalone if you can't use them. I was under the impression that the workstations need the standalone, and the rendernodes only the plugin license.

To tell you the truth, I have been waiting for Randomcontrol's Arion to FINALLY offer GPU network rendering via backburner WITH render channels (it's been a very long wait!)

I've got 4 x GTX Titan and 12 x GTX 690 installed in 16 rendernodes just sitting here idling, so I simply could not wait any longer.. Thought Octane would be the answer to my problems!

[pixelrush]

Well I am not sure what to say at this point. I know Otoy guys are good types so I think they will be willing to let you reorganise your purchases. I cant say if they would offer partial or full refund in the circumstance, not my business you understand. It does say on the purchase page what the situation is re standalone+plugin but perhaps you missed taking it in.
I think the issue is the network bandwidth vs the pci-e bus for moving data around.
Octane does have command line which allows for automation of tasks.
It depends on what work you do I suppose, but you would need to distribute tasks to each pc rather than have them all working on the same render. For animations this is ok just do it in batches, and perhaps you have different shots and jobs that can be done across the office. It may not be as sad as you imagine at the moment. Because Octane runs in GPU you can have it rendering while you do something with the CPU, there isn't much overhead. This means people at their workstations can carry on with their usual work or do their own renders. Are you an architectual firm?
It might help you to combine your GPU in say pairs in a pc if there are enough pci-e slots and the power supplies are adequate. This would give you 8 good render stations and you would need 8 license pairs. The GTX 690 are effectively 2x GTX680 for Octane purposes ie they load the same scene into each GPU so you have 2gb working space for those (this might be limiting for some scenes depending what you do). The Titans will give you 6gb.
HTH is some way. Keep asking if it isnt...

BTW another option is to send the same scene to each pc and using lens shift complete parts of the overall render to be composited later. Of course that isn't the same as network rendering though, sorry.

Edit: I should also mention, to make sure you are aware of all the hardware gotchas, that it would be better if your pc's have either integrated graphics or another basic card aboard so as to avoid the render GPU having to share vram space with the display. It will be more responsive to scene navigation as well like this. This is more important for the 690's because of the 2gb.

[gabrielefx]

you need a license standalone + Max plugin for each render node

Having me 3 workstations and one animation of 3000 frames I can launch on each machine 1000 frames to render.

Since when I use Octane for Max I never used Backburner because for each frame a good workstation can take few minutes, it depends by several factors....

I have ask to Otoy the distribute render feature to use all my networked gpus to compute one single printable big frame with pmc.
Vray-rt and Thea have this feature and it works.

But you know, Lua scripting, hair and fur are the most requested features that pro users need......

regards

[suvakas]

Octane works fine with Backburner. I'm using it here daily.
But yes, like mentioned, you need a copy of standalone with every Max plugin license.
Confusing system, I know.

Suv

[Martians]

Thanks for the replies..

My first networked Octane animation can be viewed here https://vimeo.com/85661240