Anyone use Net-Rendering?

[Ben]

I'm currently using BackBurner to net-render a bunch of scenes on a seperate machine and have come across a problem I've not had before.

I've had problems with error messages coming up before, which is fine cos you just re-load your scene and all is good. But my current problem is this -

I have set up a scene to be rendered, it has loaded fine, there are no error messages, but it doesn't seem to be able to render the first frame. It's basically just got stuck!

I've reloaded it countless times to no avail. Could it be that the scene is just too busy to render? I've got a bunch of characters inside a room, regular textures, lighting. There are also some Render Effects on there - Colour Balance, Brightness&Contrast, plus a slight motion blur on the camera (only set up for 2 passes instead of the default 12!).

Sorry for babbling, but i thought i'd make it clear what the situation incase someone does know what the problem is!

Many thanks,
Ben

[Jenn]

Have you tried doing just a normal render in max for that scene? It may just be that those frames have extremely long render times. What might be a good habit to get into is before you set up your net render with backburner. Render a few frames of each file so you can make a note of how long each render will take.

[Ben]

Yeah, thanks Jen- that was the problem, as i discovered shortly after posting that thread!

The main problem was that I had all my lights set up with Ray-Traced shadows.. flipping them to shadow maps made things much quicker.

I think you're right about checking out render times before setting it up too. I'll bare that in mind!

Thankyou lots!