Second Machine for Rendering

poorman_65

I use my laptop for my design work and I just picked up a 1070 TI and have it in a PC that I want to use for rendering.

I initially tried to share all of my Library folders through a Share on my PC. The performance on my laptop with that configuration was pretty bad.

I have discovered that when I save a Scene, it appears to create a version of each of the Morphs that I have used under my "My Library". It looks like these are a subsert of the original Morph libraries based on the size.

My question is, would it be enough to just share "My Library" with the PC to allow it to render my Scenes? I of course would have Daz Studio installed on the PC as well, but it may not have all of the Morphs and other stuff installed that my Laptop has.

Quasar

I thought the scene files just had the information for what content to load in and what settings to apply to it. if that's the case, then Studio on your render machine would have to have all the same files installed or be mapped to the same folders on your laptop. I could be wrong about what information is in a scene file though. 

kyoto kid

...If anything is out of place (like you move something from one folder to another) you will get a warning when loading the scene that either an asset or texture cannot be found and you need to locate it manually.  That could be a major chore in a large scene. Daz by itself does not support networked rendering though there is a plugin available (originally for 3DL but as I understand, also works with Iray).

Never thought about mapping the folders on the drive of one system to another, however, theoretically sounds like it might work.  It would definitely be simpler if like myself, you have a dual drive setup with the Daz programme on your C: drive and library/runtime on your D drive of the work system (you would still need the Daz programme on the render box as well).  That way you could work on a new scene (or close the Daz progamme to do something else on the notebook while the Daz programme is rendering on the render box.

Going to be receiving a second system in about a week or two so may have to experiment with this in reverse as I just upgraded my current system with more memory and a 4 GB GPU card.

Pack58

Don"t know what you can or can't do with your set up but this is how mine works (when it works):

I have one Desktop with most of my content installed, one set up for iRay and dForce and one for 3DL (I have a couple of other machines with D/S but they don't need to be part of this story).

The Content Library on the "Server" is mapped to both the others, the My Library of the two PCs I use D/S on are mapped to each other,  slightly  tricky because they both show the same name in Content Library but I mapped the onboard one first so just have to remember that when looking for saved files.

I install with DIM and don't use Smart Content but have read/viewed ways of getting Smart Content  and maybe Connect to work.Can't be bothered.

With this set up I can open a saved scene from one machine on the other and render it. BUT, my system is built from salvage, thnigs go wrong, sometimes I have to go looking for stuff, textures in particular.

I'm not trying do do what you are exactly but if any of the info is useful , great, if not then never mind.

 

Edit: l do use smart content on the pc I labled as a server above, but just to help find lost or forgotten stuff sometimes, I don't render on it and also all iRay shader packs etc and G8 contend are installed on the appropriate PC with Connect so smart contert works for that.

ReEdit: Shite spelling.

Gator

I have a second render machine.  3.5" HDDs are cheap, so I just bought a 2 TB drive for it for the library.  Even sprung the extra $10 for the hybrid drive.  

I share the download location for DIM.  There's instructions how to do that, there's a simple registry change to allow an app to access a network drive.  A nice thing with DIM is that you can export a list of what is installed, then import that list to be sure the computers have all the same content installed.

IMO, a good practice is to put any customized content outside of the library folder.  This folder needs to have the same path on each computer, like "D:\My Daz3D Custom Textures" or whatever.  And I try to keep it tidy, as it will probably build for you over time.  Have a folder for props, scenes, people, etc.  Then I just have a script copy the scenes and custom content over.