Tasks in Render Farm window

[Miguel Tano Adanes]

Please, could anybody explain what's the use of tasks in the render farm window? How a low/high number could influence the rendering time? Thanks to all!

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

This is a new setting I added to support Path Tracing of single images.  When the Path Tracer is used, these farmed images are no longer sliced (tiled).  Instead, each task renders the entire image for a certain number of passes.  The resulting images can be combined using the new method in the Image Editor.

 

If, for example, you specify a 200 pass rendering with 10 tasks, you will get 10 images with 20 passes each. The default number of tasks is 10, which should be adequate for most folks.  If you have a lot of machines in your network you may wish to increase this.  If you have identical machines on the network, you can decrease this number to the number of nodes available.  If you have different machines on your farm I would set it to at least 2X the number of nodes.

[Miguel Tano Adanes]

Thanks Roy,

so in my case I have 2 different machines and a free farm licence (2 nodes) and I will set the number of tasks to 4, right?

Then should I mount all images with the new method instead of simple arithmetic?

And this way every image is "complete", just need to put more images to increase passes. This allows me to stop the render farm and play it again further?

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

I'd leave it alone (like most settings in nXt.)

 

Combine all of the images using the new method.  The resulting (combined) image is just a path tracing image like any other.  It can be combined with other images.  You cannot "stop" and "start" the farm, though.

[Miguel Tano Adanes]

Thanks Roy, now it's all clear to me (I hope!)