No Max Time Option

[Robb63]

I always use maximum samples when rendering, but today I am rendering some cloudy plastics that sit over some high gloss white plastic parts and at 256 samples I'm getting little white dots in some areas of the cloudy plastic.
I figured I would try Max Time (for the first time ever), but I get a warning that you can't use Max Time with Network Rendering. Why would that be?

Instead, to try to fix the spotty issue I cranked up the samples to 512 and am waiting to see the result.

[DMerz III]

If you have several computers tasked with doing different regions of an image (which is what network rendering does), if one machine can calculate 50 samples in 2 mins, and another lesser powered machine only gets 10 samples. You now have a final image with 'squares' that look less done than others. It's a restriction for your own good most likely, so you don't waste time on an image that will ultimately look bad in the end.


You should still be able to use Max Samples though, they use the same 'real-time' engine, but instead of terminating the calculation based on time, they do it based on # of samples (obviously), that way, less or more power only correlates to less or more time per region, not less or more quality.

[Robb63]

Hey DMerz III, It dawned on me a few hours after posting that it was probably for a reason like that that there was a restriction. Thanks for confirming my suspicions.
As I said, I always use "Max Samples", and this was the first time in over two years of network rendering that I ever tried "Max Time". Good info to have though. Thanks!