8

Distributed Bucket Rendering Rollout (mental ray R enderer) 121
Final G ather —
Renders the scene with initial
final-gather points displayed as green dots, and
final final-gather points displayed as red dots.
Distributed Bucket Rendering
Rollout (mental ray Renderer)
Rendering menu > Render > Render Scene dialog >
Processing panel > Distributed Bucket Rendering rollo ut
Main toolbar > Render Scene > Render Scene dialog >
Processing panel > Distributed Bucket Rendering rollo ut
Note: The Processing panel appears o nly when the
mental ray renderer is the currently active renderer.
Controls on this rollout are for setting up and
managed distributed bucket rendering. With
distributed rendering, multiple networked systems
canallworkonamentalrayrendering.Buckets
are assigned to systems as they become available.
While distributed bucket rendering can be used
for offline rendering of animation frames, as in
standard network rendering, it’s best suited for
speeding up the rendering of single images as you
work. Especially when rendering hi gh-resolution
still images, you can get much faster results with
distributed bucket rendering.
Tip: When you use distributed bucket rendering,
be sure to:
• TurnonUsePlaceholderObjectsonthe
Translator Options rollout (page 3–115) .
When placeholder objects are enabled,
geometry is sent to the renderer only on
demand.
• Leave Bucket Order set to Hilber t on the
Sampling Qualit y rollout (page 3–97) .
W ith Hilbert order , the sequence of buckets to
render uses the fewest number of d ata t ransfers.
Note: Contour shading does not work with
distributed bucket rendering.
Note: You cannot use distributed bucket rendering
when you
render to texture (page 3–139) .
Impor tant: To use d istributed bucket rendering, you
must set up host systems that are capable of running the
mental ray renderer. There are two ways to do so: to set
up satellite systems, or to install mental ray standalone
licensing on remote hosts.
Satellite Systems
“Satellite” processors allow any owner of a
3ds Max license to freely use up to eig ht slave
CPUs to render an image using distributed bucket
rendering (not counting the one or two processors
on the “master” system that runs 3ds Max).
Each satellite system must have the following fi les
installed:
•
ray rc
• raysat_3dsmax <X> .bat
• raysat_3dsmax <X> .exe
• raysat_3dsmax <X> server.exe
where <X> is the current 3ds Max version n umber.
You can use the 3ds Max installation program to
install these files: see the
Installation Guide for
more information.
In addition, information about each satellite
should be stored in the
RAYHOSTS file (page
3–1095)
. You can set up satellite systems by
using the Add button on the Distributed Bucket
Rendering rollout, as described in the “Interface”
section, below.
Host Systems with SP M Licenses
When you use mental ray SPM licenses, remote
hosts (that is, all systems ot her than the one
running3dsMax)musthavethementalray
renderer (
ray.exe) and a mental ray SPM license
server running. To obtain this, you must run
the mental ray installer on all remote hosts,