Cycles Distributed Rendering?

I’ve tried it, but I didn’t get much past applying a couple materials. Changing things seems to take significantly longer than something like Keyshot or Bunkspeed at the moment. But I haven’t dug in to figure out an efficient workflow.
I’ve never really liked the interaction for applying materials in Rhino for some reason. I never really thought about why. I came from the animation side of things, so started with Maya and 3dsMax, which I still use occasionally.

I’ll give it another try soon. I didn’t get very far before crashing (everything was just suddenly gone, no errors) and I was in the middle of some things, so didn’t give it any more time than that.

Are there any video walkthroughs out there showing an intended workflow for setting up a quick scene? Soimetimes I just don’t like something because it didn’t work the way I wanted/expected it to. So I’ve been preferring seeing the intent first, in case that’s not what I expect. Otherwise I wouldn’t be giving it a real chance.