2008

Main toolbar > Render Scene > Render Scene dialog > Processing panel >
Distributed Bucket Rendering rollout
Note: The Processing panel appears only 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 can all
work on a mental ray rendering. 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
high-resolution still images, you can get much faster results with distributed
bucket rendering.
TIP When you use distributed bucket rendering, be sure to:
■ Turn on Use Placeholder Objects on the Translator Options rollout on
page 6122 .
When placeholder objects are enabled, geometry is sent to the renderer
only on demand.
■ Leave Bucket Order set to Hilbert on the
Sampling Quality rollout on page
6083 .
With Hilbert order, the sequence of buckets to render uses the fewest
number of data transfers.
NOTE Contour shading does not work with distributed bucket rendering.
NOTE You cannot use distributed bucket rendering when you render to texture
on page 6169 .
IMPORTANT To use distributed bucket rendering, you must set up host systems
that are capable of running the mental ray renderer. There are two ways to do so:
set up satellite systems, or 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 eight slave CPUs to render an image using distributed bucket rendering
(not counting the one, two, or four processors on the “master” system that
runs 3ds Max).
6132 | Chapter 18 Rendering