As you can see, the synced laptop renders the objects, but didn't render the textures or the hdri. All the textures are 100% procedural except the map used to mask the frosted glass, a displacement map to make condensation on the glasses and the hdri. This is my fifth attempt and it has happened every time.
Dear @iamjustsyd what @mark mentioned in his first comment is correct, you need to pack your image texture into your blend file, then you will need to make sure you are connected to your other nodes in crowd render, finally after packing the textures, saving your blend file, and being connected to all your computers in crowdrender, press the"resync" button to automatically re-synchronise the blend file with each computer.
This should fix the problem of the missing image textures, also if you find that this causes the computers to not sync (sync fail), then you can simply re-open the blend file by going to Blender -> File -> "revert". You should not close blender at all, this is unnecessary, doing a revert normally fixes any sync fail issues after you have resynced the file. If you still have problems, try re-opening the file instead.
Hope this helps :)
Hi Mark, I've never used video textures before, after looking around on the net, it seems that video textures and image sequence textures are not packed in the blend file. Not sure why they are treated differently but here's the page from the blender manual -> https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/files/blend/packed_data.html
So, what are the options in this case? Really your only option is to put the files on a shared location, this would mean making a folder accessible on the network and putting the files in there. Then you'd need to edit your blend file, changing the location of the video textures to the new shared location. There may be a performance penalty for doing this, depending on your network speed since it will be slower, a lot slower in fact, for your computers to access the video textures via your network, even if you have gigabit speeds.
That said, you'll probably still find it faster to distribute the render over multiple machines with a shared folder solution to this problem than rendering on just one machine if the compute power of each machine is similar.
Hope this helps :)
Hi,
I just found that I need to 'File->External Data->Pack All into Blend' before I could get textures rendering across multiple nodes.
I'm still having trouble with video textures though if any one can chime in and help?