V-Ray Swarm
This page provides information on the V-Ray Swarm distributed rendering service.
Overview
V-Ray Swarm is the new V-Ray Distributed Rendering manager, the next evolution of V-Ray Distributed Rendering, offering a number of features that make rendering with V-Ray even faster. Currently, V-Ray Swarm is available in V-Ray for Revit, V-Ray for Rhino, and V-Ray for SketchUp. Its interface is accessible by a web browser.
For more information on how to use and operate V-Ray Swarm within V-Ray for SketchUp please refer to the Swarm page.
For more information on how to use and operate V-Ray Swarm within V-Ray for Rhino please refer to the Swarm page.
For more information on how to use and operate V-Ray Swarm within V-Ray for Revit please refer to the Operating Swarm in Revit and V-Ray Swarm pages.
V-Ray Swarm controls V-Ray Distributed Rendering on each render node machine; the actual rendering is handled by V-Ray Standalone.
All that is needed to dedicate a machine as a V-Ray Distributed Rendering server, is to install and run V-Ray Swarm on it. V-Ray Swarm discovers and adds machines for rendering, handles the installation of V-Ray Standalone builds on each machine, starts and stops the rendering process, monitors CPU, RAM, and GPU resources per system, and deploys the configuration of V-Ray on all V-Ray Swarm machines with a single click. V-Ray Swarm makes V-Ray Distributed Rendering easier than ever.
The new features that V-Ray Swarm adds to V-Ray Distributed Rendering are:
Each machine participating in the render job requires a V-Ray Render Node license. This includes the workstation initiating the rendering process.
V-Ray Swarm does not provide licenses. Instead, each render node must be connected to a V-Ray Online License Server.
System Requirements
Please make sure that your system fulfills these requirements before installing V-Ray Swarm.
Windows
Intel® Pentium® IV or compatible processor with SSE3 support (x64)
Windows® 7 and newer (64-bit versions only)
Mac OS X
Intel® Pentium® IV or compatible processor with SSE3 support (x64)
Only IPv4 is supported, IPv6 is currently not supported
Linux
Intel® Pentium® IV or compatible processor with SSE3 support (x64)
USB 1.0 required for hardware lock
Only IPv4 is supported, IPv6 is currently not supported
Swarm Settings
This page provides details on the Swarm rollout in the V-Ray Asset Editor.
Overview
The new V-Ray Swarm is a web-based distributed rendering system. It’s a simple, yet powerful way to split your rendering across multiple computers.
Each machine participating in the render job requires a V-Ray Render Node license. This includes the workstation initiating the rendering process.
UI Path
||V-Ray Asset Editor|| > Settings > Swarm rollout
Swarm
Enabled – Turns Swarm, V-Ray’s web-based distributed rendering system, on or off.
Goal Slider – Sets the desired percentage of utilization of available resources. Computers added or removed to V-Ray Swarm are taken into account automatically.
V-Ray Swarm ( 
) – Opens up the V-Ray Swarm w eb interface of the current Coordinator machine. Alternatively, it can be accessed by typing in the IP address of the current Coordinator machine on the default port 24267. This allows you to see the swarm render node machines available for rendering jobs in your network. You can see which of the render node machines are connecting to the particular machine that is casting out the render to the Swarm by the IP address next to its status. This interface allows you also to configure the render node machines, tag them, or monitor their resource utilization while rendering.
Tags
Tags allow you to tag this node with a descriptor that defines something about the machine, which we can later use to selectively control from inside of SketchUp.
For example, tags can denote if this machine is one of a few that have a powerful GPU, or if a machine is not a workstation and a node on a render farm.
For information on how to use Tags, see the Swarm Configuration page.
Once the render process is initiated, machines marked with the selected tags load the scene and assist with the rendering. This is noted in both the Progress Log and the Current Usage bar located in the Swarm settings section.
All scene assets need to be transferred from the local machine to each render node machine before they can begin working on the job. If a render node machine’s V-Ray version differs from that of the local host machine, V-Ray Swarm uploads the needed builds automatically and ensures that all the render nodes use the same V-Ray build.
The blue marker displays what part of all available machines are rendering the job, and the red marker shows the machines currently occupied with another job. More detailed information on the Current usage bar is displayed upon mouse-over.
The Goal slider beneath the bar can be adjusted dynamically to add or remove assigned machines during the rendering process.
Network Discovery
The Network Discovery settings control how a Coordinator Node is selected.
If the Auto-Discovery option is turned on, V-Ray automatically assigns the machine with the greatest network visibility as a Coordinator and uses it for render-job management. The Coordinator machine is automatically changed if a different computer reports that it can communicate with more nodes than the current Coordinator.
Alternatively, the Network Discovery settings can be adjusted through the V-Ray Swarm web interface.
Turn off Swarm Network Auto-Discovery for better results.
Coordinator IP – Manually sets a network machine to be the Coordinator which is used for render-job management.
For more information on Network Discovery, see the Swarm Configuration page.
Understanding V-Ray Swarm
Introduction
Your local office could have a huge amount of computer power that you are not using. New to V-Ray for Revit, V-Ray for Rhino, and V-Ray for SketchUp, we are introducing V-Ray Swarm, which is an evolution of Distributed Rendering. It allows you to tap into all of that computer power with just a slider. It also allows you to monitor and manage the entire Swarm through a web interface.
Through a simple user interface, Swarm gives users the ability to capture all the compute power of their local network and render using either the CPU or GPU. It can be used for final frame rendering or progressive rendering, and will drastically speed up workflow allowing for more design iterations and feedback.
We would like to give a special thanks to our friends at Cooper Carry that tested V-Ray Swarm and provided us with the material we used for this blog post.
What is distributed rendering?
Distributed rendering (DR) is nothing new. It has been a part of V-Ray since version 1. The general idea is that renderings can be broken up into many little tasks. Render engines like V-Ray take advantage of this by distributing those tasks among the many cores (GPU or CPU) on your computer. The simplest way is by rendering small portions of the image, known as buckets. As each bucket is done, it moves on to the next one that is not being worked on by another core. Distributed rendering takes it a step further and adds more cores by talking to other computers on the network. Through the local network, it gets all the data that it needs to render a bucket, calculates it, sends that bucket back, and moves on to the next task.
How DR was implemented in the past?
In order to use DR, V-Ray had to be installed on every machine that you needed to render on. Then you would have to launch a Spawner program that would listen over the network if it had any tasks to do.
Then from the computer you are launching DR you need to know the network address (usually the IP) of every computer you want to use. Additionally, you would need to know the port used for DR. When going to render, you would need to select which computers you want to use, and then render.
Some of the limitations of this old system is that you had to know the port and all the addresses of the DR machines. Additionally, you would have to know how much power each DR machine had and if it was up to the task at hand. You also needed to make sure that every DR machine was using the exact same version of V-Ray.
Older Distributed Rendering Interface in V-Ray for Maya
How is V-Ray Swarm different?
Swarm is much smarter on how it communicates over the network. Here are some of the key differences:
Keep DR machines alive
Swarm is constantly monitoring the state of the computer to make sure that V-Ray is active and ready. If not, it will automatically restart it. This feature also existed in the old DR system but has been made more robust in Swarm.
Network discovery
Swarm machines automatically find each other over the network so you no longer need to know the address of each computer.
Automatically selects the master node
Using a peer-to-peer network, it automatically selects which computer will be the master node that controls and manages the entire Swarm.
Hardware profiling and tagging
Machines can be tagged as part of groups based on their resources available. It can also monitor the hardware available, such as the number of CPUs and GPUs available. Users can then include or exclude different computers or groups of computers based on tags from the swarm.
Always uses the correct version of V-Ray
The machine launching the render makes sure every other machine is rendering the same version. Each machine checks to see if their version coincides with the host machine. If it does not, then the host machine runs the correct version remotely on the Swarm machine.
Please Note: Since this feature essentially allows you to run an application from a remote computer, it uses cryptography to make sure that the application that is launched is actually V-Ray.
Highly simplified User Interface
Since a vast majority of the tasks previously needed to run DR are automatically negotiated now, the user interface is extremely simple. The user is presented with a slider that depicts the total amount of compute power available to him or her to do the rendering. By moving that slider to the right, Swarm dynamically adds more compute power. Sliding it to the left releases power.
Tagging Swarm Machines
Using a simple web interface, groups of machines can be tagged for different things. In doing so, when launching a job on the Swarm, you can use the tags to only use certain machines. For example, you may only want to tag machines that are faster than others. Or you may want to make a group of machines that are reserved for a certain job and tag them as such.
V-Ray Swarm machines can be easily managed and tagged in the web interface
What does this mean for the user?
With Swarm, you can now use every computer resource that your local network has to offer. Every machine on the network has the potential to contribute to the rendering, including administration and accounting computers. Because of the way that Swarm manages resources, the users on the Swarm machines will generally not even be aware that their computers are being used for rendering.
A few things to note
Swarm relies on a fast Local Area Network (LAN) to communicate between different machines. It needs this to keep open connections in order to move and distribute data. In its current state it is not well suited for communication over a Wide Area Network (WAN) such as between different offices, or to an external cloud resource. Swarm also needs machines to be on the same subnet of the network to work.
Additionally, each Swarm machine needs a V-Ray Render node license to run. This means that if you have 100 computers with Swarm on them, but only 5 render node licenses, only 5 will be used to render.
What is in the future?
The current state of Swarm is built to mainly work on local networks. We are looking at many other tools to drastically increase the compute power that is available to the user on a much larger scale. In doing so, rendering will essentially become instant.
V-Ray для Revit: звено, которого не хватало
Система рендеринга V-Ray для Autodesk Revit
Преподаватели архитектурных вузов среди программ, обязательных к освоению студентами, непременно называют Autodesk Revit. По статистике от кадровых агентств, знание этой программы требуют от 73% всех претендентов на должности, связанные с архитектурой и дизайном. А программный продукт группы компаний Chaos Group — мощная система рендеринга V-Ray, теперь интегрированная и в платформу Autodesk Revit, — наделяет столь востребованный цифровой инструментарий архитекторов и дизайнеров не только необходимой для работы скоростью, но и не менее важной для творчества гибкостью. Поскольку он позволяет встраиваться в проектный процесс на любой его стадии: от концептуального синтеза идеи до визуальной ее реализации. И неудивительно, что систему рендеринга V-Ray для Revit уже оценили и используют в своей работе 92% архитектурных бюро.
Преемственность и объединяющие функции
В V-Ray для Revit использованы привычный интерфейс и знакомые предустановки, что позволяет не тратить время на дополнительное освоение программы, а практически сразу приступать к работе. V-Ray беспроблемно встраивается в процесс визуализации, на каком бы из этапов рабочего процесса его ни подключили, обеспечивая при этом простоту управления и высокую скорость обработки модели. Кроме того, по откликам проектировщиков, V-Ray стал тем самым «пазлом», которого так недоставало архитекторам и дизайнерам, чтобы считать свои программные инструменты единым, завершенным комплектом. Теперь смена одной платформы на другую не доставит неудобств, поскольку V-Ray для Revit поддерживает и объединяет все пакеты V-Ray (для SketchUp, для Rhino и для 3ds Max) в единый конвейер рендеринга.
Быстродействие
Впечатляющий рост скорости обработки достигнут благодаря применению системы V-Ray Swarm, в которой реализовано дальнейшее развитие принципов распределенного рендеринга (DR), заложенного в V-Ray с самой первой версии. Суть DR состоит в разбиении рендеринга на множество мелких задач и распределения их для выполнения по нескольким ядрам центральных (CPU) или графических (GPU) процессоров. Такой подход ускоряет технологический процесс за счет использования всех вычислительных мощностей локальной сети и делает доступной обработку проектов самых больших сооружений.
Обрабатываемая модель разделяется на небольшие участки (бакеты). После рендеринга одного бакета ядро выбирает для обработки другой участок из числа не занятых другими ядрами. V-Ray Swarm через локальную сеть добавляет к выполнению рендеринга и ядра других компьютеров.
Раньше для этого нужно было знать много данных: от IP-адреса до мощности задействованных в сети машин, — а также устанавливать на них одинаковую версию V-Ray. Сейчас система V-Ray Swarm позволяет машинам автоматически обнаруживать друг друга и без IP, сама назначает из них главный управляющий узел, сама оценивает ресурсы компьютера или степень его занятости, прежде чем включить ее в сеть Swarm. Также — в случае несовпадения программных пакетов — система сама запускает нужную версию лицензионной Swarm (с использованием криптографии, поскольку процесс удаленный). При этом важно, чтобы все компьютеры находились в одной подсети.
Простота управления
Многие из ручных действий, требовавшихся ранее для запуска DR, в V-Ray теперь автоматизированы. Кроме роста быстродействия, это упрощает и интерфейс. Управление вычислительной мощностью сети, задействованной в рендеринге, свелось к одному ползунку, отражающему доступный объем ресурсов. Достаточно сдвинуть его влево-вправо для уменьшения или увеличения параметра. Удобен интерфейс V-Ray и для самого процесса проектирования. Он позволяет быстро установить соотношение «качество/скорость», чтобы ускорить итерации в черновом режиме или перевести рендеринг в режим высокого презентационного качества.
Мощный арсенал средств
В V-Ray для Revit рендеринг доступен в интерактивном режиме: настройки освещения и фактуру материалов можно менять прямо в процессе работы над проектом — визуализация результатов будет получена мгновенно.
Моделирование освещения проводится с точным с учетом законов физики, геометрии объекта, с применением эффектов Sun и Sky, а также с отображением реальных атмосферных явлений в построении воздушной перспективы или в средовом обыгрывании архитектурного образа.
Плюс к этому у V-Ray для Revit есть множество и других достоинств, подтверждающих 10-летний статус флагманского продукта V-Ray: от автоудаления визуальных шумов до моделирования реальной фотокамеры с точной настройкой цвета прямо в буфере кадра; от легкого преобразования изображения в схему до возможности масштабной (1:1) проверки проекта; от поддержки границ тонирования до задействования стереоскопической камеры и др. V-Ray для Revit содержит большую архитектурную библиотеку материалов – более чем 500 полностью настраиваемых фотореалистичных материалов V-Ray, что кардинально уменьшает затрачиваемое время на визуализацию вашего проекта. Библиотека материалов совместима для использования с V-Ray для 3DS Max, V-Ray для Rhino и V-Ray для SketchUp.
V-Ray Swarm: the next step of Distributed Rendering.
Easy way to use your local network for V-Ray rendering.
This article appeared first on Chaos Group Laboratories Blog and is published with the permission of Chaos Group.
V-Ray Swarm is new to V-Ray for Revit, V-Ray for Rhino, and V-Ray for SketchUp. You can use all processing power (CPU or GPU) of your computers with a slider. You can also monitor Swarm through a web interface. V-Ray Swarm will speed up workflow of progressive rendering and final frame rendering.
Rendering on more than one machine
Distributed rendering has been a part of V-Ray since the beginning. The general idea is that renderings can be broken up into many little tasks. Render engines like V-Ray take advantage of this by distributing those tasks among the many cores (GPU or CPU) on your computer. The simplest way is by rendering small portions of the image (buckets). As each bucket is done, it moves on to the next one that is not being worked on by another core. Distributed rendering takes it a step further and adds more cores by talking to other computers on the network. Through the local network, it gets all the data that it needs to render a bucket, calculates it, sends it back, and moves on to the next task.
Older implementation
In order to use DR, V-Ray had to be installed on every machine that you needed to render on. Then you would have to launch a Spawner program that would listen over the network if it had any tasks to do.
Then from the computer you are launching DR you need to know the network address (usually the IP) of every computer you want to use. Additionally, you would need to know the port used for DR. When going to render, you would need to select which computers you want to use, and then render.
Some of the limitations of this old system is that you had to know the port and all the addresses of the DR machines. Additionally, you would have to know how much power each DR machine had and if it was up to the task at hand. You also needed to make sure that every DR machine was using the exact same version of V-Ray.
You can now use every computer resource of your local network. Swarm can manage resources, so the users on the Swarm machines will generally not even be aware that their computers are being used for rendering.
Limitations: Swarm uses LAN, it’s not suited for WAN network. Swarm needs to operate on the same subnet.