Working with Complex Projects

Simulations and Instances

Cloth, particles, MoGraph clones - if they aren’t baked, they’ll break across distributed render nodes. Jobs will fail or return inconsistent frames.

• Fix: bake and cache everything. Assume the render network won’t calculate sims live.

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Local Render Testing

IPR rendering is fast and you have everything cached locally. Test rendering through your DCC to see if there are any bottlenecks before sending to the Render Network. The Network has to cache the scene on each node that it’s sent to, so if there are performance issues caused by live deformations that are CPU process, those will hit initialization walls on your scene on each node and add significant render time.

• Fix: Again - bake and cache everything. This isn’t intuitive, but if you find your scene is taking 25 minutes to initialize rendering before it begins rendering, there are some areas in the scene that could potentially be baked to alembic or PLA to streamline the rendering.

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Outputs and AOVs

Once you hit render, outputs are locked. If you forget to enable an AOV, the only way to get it is to render the whole thing again. At 18K, that’s not a mistake you want to make.

• Fix: double-check outputs, enable multi-layer EXRs, and include all required passes before submission. Toggle down your job details after submission and review briefly to ensure the settings are correct and AOVs are listed - If they aren’t - cancel the job and resubmit.