Hello,
to speed up my renders, I´d like to buy 2 new CPUs, implement them in my network and use them for network rendering with Maya 2012, Mental Ray and/or VRay 2.0, my render manager is Smedge.
I don´t have a server, so my idea is to attach a NAS System to the LAN (WD My Book Life, that is connected to the network by LAN cable.)
So the system looks like this: My workstation, the 2 CPUs and the NAS as the central server with the project on it, so every machine should find all the files and textures for rendering.
So far so good, my question is about the network traffic: Do the render machines load the used textures with every package to render again and again over the network, or do they load the textures only one time with the first package, and then only the information from the render manager wich package to render?
If they load the textures are loaded everytime again I think the network with the NAS could be too slow to give a good render performance and I have to think about a more expensive server...
Does anyone have experience with a solution like this? I don´t have unlimited money and would prefer the NAS solution, but not if the performance sucks.
Thanks for replies,
all the best, Laubi