Send to Network render better way?

[mattjgerard]

So, I'm working from home, and while i have decent download speeds the upload speeds in my area are abysmal. I've noticed this for a while in Keyshot that when saving different studios/multi materials, cameras, etc to the render queue, it appears to save a whole new copy of the project, and sends it to the NR. While this is usually fine over a super speed internal corporate network, I'm banging my head on my desk waiting for these things to upload to my corp network via hardware VPN.

Most of the time, I'm rendering out a couple few camera angles, parts configs via studios and model sets, stuff like that. Is there a way to package that stuff for the NR so that it doesn't have to make and upload a dozen keyshot files that are exactly the same except for stuff turned off or a different camera angle? Would be super efficient to just get the render queue loaded with all the different renders and have the system be smart enough to know to just upload the one file and read the render queue on the master end. There's probably some tricks that I could do to use the camera change animation to render out my different camera angles from one upload, any other tricks I could try?

[Eric Summers]

(I've never used network render so I don't know exactly how it works)

Could you set up your renders locally (studios, cameras, whatever), save the file, remote desktop to a machine with KS installed that is physically at your office on the corporate network, open the file on that machine and send to NR from there? It would remove the slow upload for each render added to the queue. You'd just have to convince IT that it is necessary

[TGS808]

(I've never used network render so I don't know exactly how it works)

Could you set up your renders locally (studios, cameras, whatever), save the file, remote desktop to a machine with KS installed that is physically at your office on the corporate network, open the file on that machine and send to NR from there? It would remove the slow upload for each render added to the queue. You'd just have to convince IT that it is necessary

If he's able to take those steps (remote in to a machine with KS), that would likely do it. It cuts out the slow part. Good idea.

[andy.engelkemier]

That's a great thought....if keyshot worked over remote desktop. I suppose I haven't tried it in a while, but it didn't a while back. Just came up black.
But teamviewer, splashtop, chrome remote desktop, all work. But that's less helpful if that user doesn't have a computer in both locations.

One other reason to set this up also. Keyshot does this Crazy thing, and saves the rendered image file using the computer that sent it. That totally makes sense if you render to your own local drive. But doesn't make much sense if you render to say: \\mediaServ-S1\m$\Projects\KeyshotProject
So you send it from home. It renders at work. Then it send the image back to your home computer, to then save back on the server at work.
Because of this, we decided to never use PSD again since they save uncompressed. PNG is a godsend when network rendering from home.

But also, render to your local drive so it doesn't have to make that inefficient loop. Having to do this all over VPN isn't going to help any either.

[Eric Summers]

That's a great thought....if keyshot worked over remote desktop. I suppose I haven't tried it in a while, but it didn't a while back. Just came up black.
But teamviewer, splashtop, chrome remote desktop, all work. But that's less helpful if that user doesn't have a computer in both locations.

One other reason to set this up also. Keyshot does this Crazy thing, and saves the rendered image file using the computer that sent it. That totally makes sense if you render to your own local drive. But doesn't make much sense if you render to say: \\mediaServ-S1\m$\Projects\KeyshotProject
So you send it from home. It renders at work. Then it send the image back to your home computer, to then save back on the server at work.
Because of this, we decided to never use PSD again since they save uncompressed. PNG is a godsend when network rendering from home.

But also, render to your local drive so it doesn't have to make that inefficient loop. Having to do this all over VPN isn't going to help any either.

I've been using vanilla Windows Remote Desktop Connection for 5ish years with no black screen issues on Win 7 and Win 10 (just in case someone finds this thread later and is curious).

I do have to use dummy folders - one for Renderings and one for Scenes (even though I don't save renders to that folder or have Scenes located there). Otherwise trying to render local and remote causes some issues for things like sequential render numbering and the queue. This was after several years of having problems that Niko finally helped me get things straightened out. So, I could be wrong, but you might be able to eliminate that back and forth loop by making sure that the remote machine has its "dummy folders" set to locations on that machine or on the corporate network where the remote machine is physically located. This setup eliminates the local machine from the equation, it's just there as an interface for the remote machine only.

[andy.engelkemier]

Ah, I talked to a coworker and said the black screen had been fixed for a while. I just hadn't tried it in quite a while. Thanks for updating on that.

I'm not sure I follow with the folders though. It took Quite a long time for us to figure out what was happening, and I realized that it wouldn't save at All unless I used UNC paths (even though they are all mapped with the same permissions to the same drive letter), but I was confused that it wasn't saving images in the location until I connected my network monitor at home again.
Saving crazy large images took forever, and we realized that was because it was making a full loop, which makes sense how it can actually do a network render save to your local machine.

If you render, but disconnect the your home machine from VPN which submitted the renders, our renderings don't go anywhere...sort of. They are tucked away on the network manager machine, but not saved with the correct filenames or organized yet. So very annoying to get to if something goes wrong.
I suppose I hadn't tried creating a share on that machine and rendering to it, but since it's working the same way with a network path I'm not sure why it would be any different.
I didn't really get any help from Keyshot about it other than "it must be a permissions issue." But without me telling our IT group what that means all they did was laugh, explaining that without stating what requires permissions, that isn't helpful because all of those machines Do have permissions to the same folders, which I already knew.

[Eric Summers]

Ah, I don't use network rendering so that probably makes a difference.

[Furniture_Guy]

Frontier fiber optic direct to the attic home router. 500Mbps up and 500Mbps down...

Perry (Furniture_Guy)

[mattjgerard]

Frontier fiber optic direct to the attic home router. 500Mbps up and 500Mbps down...

Perry (Furniture_Guy)

You can just be quiet. 

I've got fiber running through my front yard, been there 6 years, can't find out whos it is or how to tap into it. DSL sucks here, cable sucks less, but they still refuse to give any decent upload speeds. I've got 400 down and 10 up. How does that make sense?

Anyway, I don't have another box at the office running a full version of KS, so that idea is out. I can remote into the network render node (its just one box running the master and the worker process, but that doesn't really get me anywhere. I do target my renders to a netwrk drive local to the NR node, so it doesn't do the loop DL/UL thing. I target that remote network drive, send the renders to the master, then when they are done i download them manually from the remote network drive to my workstation working drive at home. Works pretty slick. the hardware VPN helps everything work pretty smooth as far as network transparency and stuff.

Even if I was at work I'm sure the IT guys would appreciate less traffic by not sending the same 1 gb file 20 times across the network for each project.

Time to jump over to the wish list forum

[Furniture_Guy]

Frontier fiber optic direct to the attic home router. 500Mbps up and 500Mbps down...

Perry (Furniture_Guy)

You can just be quiet. 

I've got fiber running through my front yard, been there 6 years, can't find out whos it is or how to tap into it. DSL sucks here, cable sucks less, but they still refuse to give any decent upload speeds. I've got 400 down and 10 up. How does that make sense?

Sorry, didn't mean to be a dick about it.

You have my undying admiration for getting your work done under such limited connection speeds. The providers are mostly just concerned with streaming so high download speed is enough. Most people forget that when you're on a Zoom call, your are uploading your own video and audio in addition to downloading everyone else's. Going forward I'll be more grateful for my data speeds. It seems like something that's easy to take for granted...

Perry (Furniture_Guy)

[mattjgerard]

Sorry, didn't mean to be a dick about it.

You have my undying admiration for getting your work done under such limited connection speeds. The providers are mostly just concerned with streaming so high download speed is enough. Most people forget that when you're on a Zoom call, your are uploading your own video and audio in addition to downloading everyone else's. Going forward I'll be more grateful for my data speeds. It seems like something that's easy to take for granted...

Perry (Furniture_Guy)

Hey no worries Perry! Totally didn't take it that way. I am super jealous of that fiber connection! If I had that I'd probably never go back to the office, which is probably not good for me in the long run.

Anyway, yeah, its not so bad, just a matter of time management and waiting for the NR window to catch up. I can watch my upload link saturate to the hilt when I hit the go button, so I'm glad KS is using every little bit of available speed. If I was 15 miles south of where I'm at I'd have access to residental fiber 1gb up and down. Crazy. I think its pretty easy to get used to what we have and always scream for more! like hard drive space, there's never enough. I just bought a 36TB NAS to store home media on, and its already 60% full!!!!  I thought it would last me years.

Cheers, mate!

mg

[andy.engelkemier]

It doesn't really matter how fast your home internet is if you office VPN is a limiting factor.
Cheaper VPN throughput limits users to 100Mbps (about12MB/s), with a maximum of 1Gbps. So if you have 15 users connected to that, you'll probably have at least a few spurts where you are only getting closer to 50Mbps. You're really fast internet doesn't help you there.
ALSO that cheap VPN doesn't automatically direct traffic through the fastest path. So that youtube video you're watching ends up sending the traffic to the office and you're streaming from there.
Doesn't apply to people with nicer VPN setups, but it's something to keep in mind for the rest of us.

[mattjgerard]

It doesn't really matter how fast your home internet is if you office VPN is a limiting factor.
Cheaper VPN throughput limits users to 100Mbps (about12MB/s), with a maximum of 1Gbps. So if you have 15 users connected to that, you'll probably have at least a few spurts where you are only getting closer to 50Mbps. You're really fast internet doesn't help you there.
ALSO that cheap VPN doesn't automatically direct traffic through the fastest path. So that youtube video you're watching ends up sending the traffic to the office and you're streaming from there.
Doesn't apply to people with nicer VPN setups, but it's something to keep in mind for the rest of us.

yeah, its a large corp setup, so it probably has some sort of smarts to it, but the limit def is on the other end as I DL stuff from the render node at the office. Fruistrating thing about windows is that you can't map an ethernet port to a network. I have one port connected to my hardware VPN box for work, and I have another conencted to my home network switch. There isn't a way to tell each application or service which port to use. Windows just seems to blow requests out both holes and which ever responds first gets the data. There was a little utility to map stuff, but it was pretty CLI focused and being a work box they don't allow me to mess with the details in the computer much.