Speeding up my Vray workflow OSX

[vlado]

Just realised my reply never showed up. My issues are really with the general user operability of vray installations in osx. The unix executable files are a bit clunky. For vrayslave, for example, these files don't seem to be able to run from startup like other osx apps. So you have to manually go into the bin folder and run them.

Thanks, will see what can be done about it.

It would be great if you could have an easy way to set up vrayslaves on each machine without having to type any code. ie you click an installer icon and it installs, and you hey presto have an app which you can put in the start up items for vray slave, like the vrlservice.

On all other OSes, this is what you can do right away without anything special (i.e. create a shortcut to the V-Ray DR spawner in the Startup folder or whatever). Beats me why Mac OS X always needs special treatment even for such simple things

Also it would be great if you could have a browse feature in the distributed rendering dialogue. ie it searches for available slaves. For someone like me it takes me an afternoon to find out what my computer's IP address is!

You can use computer names too, not just IPs.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Bertjenkins]

Yes i guess it's just that they stick out a bit on osx when they have the 'exec' icon... they don't seem like apps you trust

As for the computer names, etc, DR works a treat when it's set up. I now use computer names. But i was ignoring it for about 3 months, and missed out on a whole lot of render power, just because you had to set up the slaves, etc in the terminal, and after a few hours of nerding I would give up. If you didn't have to set them up like that i'm sure a lot of users like me would start a lot sooner with DR and all the power it gives you...

[Bertjenkins]

Hi -
Apologies, it is possible to load vrayslave on startup. I don't know why it wasn't working on a previous build, i think i had changed the extension. But it loads on startup now.

thanks

[BEIGE]

What kind of machine do you have now? problem is if you have a mix of mac's and pc this will create extra overhead for you in terms of management. I also read somewhere that render results vary between mac's and pc, but Vlado would be able to better clarify that statement.

I'm running a Mac OS X Mountain Lion host and rendering with Windows 7 and CentOS Linux slaves and it works fine in the recent nightlies. The automatic asset transfer works perfectly and there are no differences in render buckets between any of the platforms. It's flawless.

vray rt is still being developed, and I am not sure what sort of support they have for mac's, but in my experience rt seems to be less stable.

RT GPU is not as stable as RT CPU mode, which works fine in OS X. You get support for more shader networks and stuff in CPU mode so I just gave up on using a GPU with V-Ray until it has support for enough stuff to use in place of the CPU mode.

If you are having problems with a slave service loading, it's most likely either died during render (rare) or you just installed it and it didn't load automatically after installation. I don't have issues with slaves loading but you have to make sure you type "yes" when doing the terminal installation and it asks you if you want to enable it as a service. But that's par for the course - Linux, Windows and Mac OS X behave the same in that regard.

Bertjenkins - here is a simpler solution for you to run a slave manually from an OS X terminal if you have to. open the terminal and type this and hit enter:

echo "alias slave='/Applications/ChaosGroup/V-Ray/Maya2013-x64/bin/vrayslave'" >> ~/.bashrc

If you are using a different version of V-Ray for Maya (2012, 2011, etc), change the Maya version there.

After opening a new terminal, you can just type "slave" to run the service in case it's not running. Much easier than typing the full path every time. If you need to edit that file to update the path for a different version in the future, you can open the file in TextEdit.app to avoid having to use a command line text editor:

open -a /Applications/TextEdit.app/ ~/.bashrc

open works like a double click on a file in the Finder

[Bertjenkins]

Brilliant

Thanks Beige. Works a treat. I had the slave running on my other two mac pros at startup before, but that's a much easier way to start and stop it quickly. Just out of interest, what's your prefferred nightly build at the mo? I use snow leapord (maya2012) , and there don't seem to have been many new builds for ages for osx? Or was i looking in the wrong place?

I'm absolutely loving Vray RT currently. Can't imagine being without it. I use CPU, but i still have a few qualms with RT. I might as well put them up here in case any clever people at chaos group decide to instantly fix them! Apologies if you've heard it all before...

1. Some geometry renders fine but seems to freeze up (or slow down insanely) the initial RT initialization. Seems to happen more if you work in maya render view. I do a lot of stuff with smooth mesh preview and i'm guessing it could be a subdivision issue.

2. The warnings 'scene is empty' and 'Cant write image file .png', 'render is not re-entrant' are kind of annoying, they don't really explain what the problem is- it seems like i'm constantly drawing red render region squares until something happens. I think a little more useful feedback in the script editor would encourage you to sit and wait a little longer for things to warm up. Often there's not a problem, but you end up giving up because nothing is happening.

3. Vray render buffer. Sorry, but the integration is extremely annoying. I've reverted to using maya's IPR because a can't stand all these windows floating around and popping up. And why cant you fire a render from a specific camera? Or fire a new IPR wihtout having to go back to the maya render buffer? Quite regularly i make massive tweaks to my lights and completely change my scene before realising i forgot to press the srgb button. (arrgh) And the scene detail stamp cuts off a good part of the image, kind of annoying.

Right that's it. Phew it feels good to get that off my chest!

[BEIGE]

you can't use the slave command to stop the server - you have to kill the process by hitting control-C in the window with the slave active or do it with the "kill" terminal command and the process ID (more complicated).

The issues with RT are probably known by Chaos Group and those you mention are common issues (2 is not really an issue - just bad warnings). I'm hoping that RT can eventually rival Arnold's IPR renderer, which is instant and very fast.

3: ya, I don't bother with the VFB when using RT. Maybe check out my V-Ray Tuner script ( http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/do...tuner-for-maya ) to see if there are some things to speed up your workflows like creating LWF settings, which is a single button in the main V-Ray Tuner UI.

[Bertjenkins]

Thanks for the tip.
Cool, sounds like the LWF settings could save me a lot of fiddling. I'll check out that script too. Thanks!

[BEIGE]

also, there is a recent nightly Mac build here:

https://nightlies.chaosgroup.com/#/l...tlies/20130108

The Mac builds aren't in their regular script but if you request one for a particular bug fix, they are usually good about getting around to it.

[ripster8690]

Any help would be greatly appreciated in suggesting the appropriate graphics card for my Mac Pro system to do GPU rendering. Currently using an NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 1536 MB card of which the mfg said would work with vray, and it didn?t

here is what i am currently working with:
hardware: Currently run three 2009 8 core mac pros, running osx 10.9.5 all networked together
software: autodesk maya 2014 along with Vray version 3.52.03

maybe i should ask the question: Is it possible to do GPU rendering on a Mac ?

[shaio]

Hi,
the card that you have is pretty old and supports CUDA version 1.3 while V-Ray needs at least CUDA version 2 and up.

maybe i should ask the question: Is it possible to do GPU rendering on a Mac ?

Yes it is possible to render on the GPU with the CUDA engine on macOS using Fermi-, Kepler-, Maxwell- and Pascal- based NVIDIA cards.
We dont support OpenCL rendering on macOS and since most of the newest Mac machines come with AMD cards a good solution is to have an external GPU (eGPU) enclosure on Thunderbold 2/3 port. Putting one of the cards I mentioned above inside such an eGPU enclosure will allow you to render with V-Ray GPU on macOS. V-Ray runs on those enclosure without a problem for production and IPR. You should keep in mind that most of the enclosures require macOS Sierra or higher.

I hope this answers your question. If you need any more information please let me know.

[ripster8690]

Hi Ivan
Thanks for the info. However, my mac pros are too old to run Sierra, they will run on Yosemite, will that work? If so, Is it possible to get one of these cards and put it into my mac pro, it holds up to 4 cards

[shaio]

On Yosemite V-Ray works fine. If you have such a card and there are drivers for it for the current OS you could give a try. If there are no official nVidia drivers for the desired OS (Yosemite in your case) then most probably the card wont run on this mac at all. If the card is recognizable by the OS it should work fine with V-Ray. Hopefully this would answer your question. I'll do a little research and if I gather some more information I'll share it here.

[ripster8690]

Thanks for all your help, as i would like to pursue GPU rendering