Render over LAN

tring01

I've seen numerous opinions expressed about having a second machine to perform your Daz3D renders via LAN, so I went straight to the horse's mouth.  I submitted this ticket to Tech Support:

I travel quite a bit for business and work with Daz on a gaming laptop. It is plenty fast enough for working with Daz and doing test renders, but it is completely impractical to use it to render animations (it renders 3Delight even slower than IRay since it has a mid range Nvidia card). I'm searching for solutions. I'm considering building a workstation just for running IRay renders. it's my understanding that I could export the scene as a .duf file and remotely load it onto my machine at home for rendering - but that I would have to have all the same Daz products used in the scene on both machines. Are my assumptions correct? Would I be allowed to install all my Daz files on two Windows machines so that I could use one for rendering and one for working with Daz - or does that violate my license agreement?

I got this response (in about 15 minutes at 8 PM CDT on a Thursday night I might add):

Great question. Yes you can install your products on as many workstations as you like as long as you are the only user using those products. The solution you proposed would also work as long as you could remote into your home workstation to send the file and start the render. 

let me know if you have any other questions. 
Thanks 
Topher

Sone

I use Microsoft's OneDrive. It syncs well between my two DAZ machines. I just drop a copy of the Scene duf into a DAZ folder on OneDrive, and it syncs it to my powerful render workstation. It's just a simple drag and drop from there into DAZ to load the scene. Works great and OneDrive is free and intrgrates well into Windows. I keep both machines duplicated with the exact same content so there is no "missing file" warnings.  

tring01

I use Mac, work Windows machines and home windows machine.  Have to have a cross platform solution so I use DropBox.  Just bought 1 TB of space for a year with unlimited versioning (you can go back in time to retrieve earlier versions of files and even deleted files).  I plan on using the DropBox folder as my local Daz directory on all machines.  Should work just as you describe, thanks.

Sone

Dropbox is cool for sure too! :) You've inspired me tring01 to set up all my saved scene files to a syncing OneDrive folder. "Open recent" should work real slick then I'm thinking.

tring01

Using DropBox is working extremely well.  My render machine sits in the corner humming away and I see the images loading into the DropBox directory on my laptop.  I can open it and look at  them to be sure my results are as expected.

One thing though - DropBox keeps a local copy of all the files on every machine where you install it - so that you can work on them offline.  Definitely need to archive completed projects to keep DropBox from eating up too much hard drive space on your machines.