Distributed Rendering in Corona behaves a bit differently and it’s more limited than V-Ray’s implementation.
With V-Ray it’s possible to add/remove specific render nodes while the job is rendering, with Corona unfortunately this is not possible.
It’s fair to ask why don’t we just use the “Search LAN during render” option, but that still doesn’t give us too much control over which pc should participate on the job and therefore we came up with a different approach.
In order to add nodes on the fly the Corona DR job will require a master workstation set to night mode, and the ability to run a normal (gui) version of 3ds Max. Once a render node joins the job the render will pause, the newly joined nodes will be added to the list and the it will resume rendering. So if you see 3ds Max stopping and resuming from time to time that is perfectly normal.
We understand that this behavior doesn’t suit every workflow and it could be slower than manually setting up a DR job, but for now, this is the only way to make it work with the Render Manager.
We and the Developers at Corona are highly recommending the use of “Tile Rendering” option as it is a much better option in most of the cases then DR.