So i was stupid enough to encounter a little problems and some of them were me not knowing any better and i bombarded the Report an Issue tracker with 3 mails. Many problems which got fixed after me realising i had done something wrong. So i thought well, forum is a better place for interaction so i dont keep reporting already fixed problems.
Issues i've had so far:
1. Linked objects won't Sync/Render, i have two linked groups in my scene referencing data from other files. that data is grouped objects like all the environment, and its lighting, the character, the character lighting, all of them linked from other files and tweaked through proxies, But when a file seems to have linked data from another file in it the thing wont sync, it either gets stuck at syncing 1% or shows syncing failed.
2. local seems to render everything with textures, other PC's render it without textures
the workaround seems to be to pack all textures into the blend file.
3. as soon as i hit "Make compositor Nodes" button blender shuts down.
Hallo könntet ihr mir helfen?
Nach dem rendern erscheind bei mir kein Bild
Was mache ich falsch ?
Ich kann kein Englisch deswegen ist es schwierig für mich alles so umzusetzen wie es erwartet wird aber ich taste mich langsam heran und werde wenn ich alle fehler behoben habe mal selber ein Video machen in Deutsch damit andere die Vileicht die selben Probleme hatten wie ich es leichter haben
10. ohkay, i thnk there is some serious problem here, this is the second render so the first one should have optimized it, here is the screenshot.
9. This
So i have this default blender scene opened on the other machine, and because i was getting some syncing errors on it i connected the other machine to the local just to see if there aren't any connection issues. and it showed sync so i moved back to my local and pressed resync and after it synced this is the render result.
7. i believe this is a issue with the denoiser, since it needs surrounding pixels to properly denoise and when frames are split those pixels are not available, this wont be an issue in the final frame rendering i think. this thing is only noticable at low samples.
8. The re-syncing experience is not smooth, after like 50 changes in the lighting including adding and deleting some lights, it had trouble resyncing and showed resync failed after i clicked the button.
now i reopened the file and it is still unable to sync and is showing sync failed. Sometimes clicking the resync button just shows it getting stuck at "uploading 1%". So i have to close and re-open it a bunch of times till it starts working again. Sometimes it just works with one click and i dont have to deal with any trouble.
but the problem could lie in low transfer speeds and huge file sizes on my end.
YEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHH VERSION 1.3 RELEASE LETS GO
1. HOLY WOW EVERYTHING WORKS SEAMLESSLY, little thing i noticed though that the metadata strips get rendered for each system instead of just one for the entire image. its not a showstopper though.
2. On one of the PC,s i think it didn't install properly or something. on the other two computers as soon as i enable the addon from userprefs, a windows popup asks for the admin permission first. however it didn't ask on this one. and the rendertab is empty. needless to say it failed to connect from the nodes list.
3. this is sortoff a non-issue, but when i try hit remove button in the addon tab in the userprefs, (to remove the older version and install the new one) it gives me a huge error message instead.
4. working on the same file, about an hour later it was taking more time to resync, then i hit the resync button and got resync failed message. i closed and reopened blender on the other machine, connected that to my local machine and the connection was successfull (default scene), so back to the file i was working on, i removed and connected the node again and it wasn't able to connect (took too much time, didn't show the connection failed message) so i re-opened the file and now it definitely wont connect. seems that i would have to restart the machine.
and the place where "this machine :ready" now has nothing in it.
5. Somewhere between me restarting everything, the addon must've changed the the render engine from cycles to BI render engine, took me a solid 10 minutes trying to figure out what the hell is wrong. so i changed it back and on my 3r reopening of the file everything seems to work as normal.
6. i have some animated lamps, i changed and deleted the keyframes on some of them, and it seems that it wot sync again and has lost connection. and as soon as that happens it changes to blender render for some reason.
alright, that's enough for today, sorry if all this seems pretty vague but i have a hard time lacating exactly what and where the error happened so. BUT overall this is insanely awesome.
Hi Pranavjit, ok seems like the colourspace settings aren't being tracked and copied to the render nodes. I'll investigate this and propose a patch to fix it. In the mean time, can you set the colour space you want, then connect to the render node with this file, then press "resync" once the node is connected. This will force a complete upload of the file to that node and should carry the colourspace setting with it allowing you to render on all nodes with the colour space you set on the master. This is what I recommend when something doesn't sync properly as it will def fix it.
All the best
James
okay so something interesting is happening, the character layer i was talking about, well it does work like it's supposed to (Being a linked object and all) but when i stitch them together in natron (I just could not get past the error message of compositing nodes in (1.)) anyway here's no.7
7. so the character has some nice subsurface and lighting, and fortunately a little bit of it peaks over to the other half of the frame where it's split, in natron i stitch them together and this is how it looks
i thought that since on other computers we have to open blender and set up crowdrender and make sure the render engine is set to cycles, i thought that maybe it is a colorspace (or color profile? whatever it's called) issue and on the other machine i set it to filmic colorspace aswell (the whole film is to be rendered in filmic)
but nothing changed, instead of the right side being rendered by the other computer it now just rendered the left side, issue is still the same.
to make sure it is a colorspace issue, i did a local render and then switched from filmic to default,here are two screenshots from blender viewer.
So yes it is definately a filmic/colorspace issue.
i think thats about all the problems i can find in this file, letme test it now with the same one as i did for 1.2
AAALRIGHT! Version 1.3 let's go yeeah
1. Clicking the Make compositor nodes button (Compositor not open this time, and it was the default view) gave me this error
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Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Users/jamesmac/Desktop/cr_compile/releases/multi OS releases/crowdrender/src/cr/ui_operators.py", line 114, in invoke
File "/Users/jamesmac/Desktop/cr_compile/releases/multi OS releases/crowdrender/src/cr/ui_operators.py", line 120, in execute
File "/Users/jamesmac/Desktop/cr_compile/releases/multi OS releases/crowdrender/src/cr/recombine_multi_exr.py", line 388, in create_renderlayer_nodes
File "/Users/jamesmac/Desktop/cr_compile/releases/multi OS releases/crowdrender/src/cr/recombine_multi_exr.py", line 209, in create_node_network
KeyError: 'bpy_prop_collection[key]: key "local:0250.exr" not found'
location: <unknown location>:-1
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2. In the Properties Panel and in the Render Sub Panel, everything except the Crowdrendering Panel disappears while its rendering, and evrything also disappears in the Renderlayers, Scene, World, Vertex, Material, Texture, Particle, and Physics Sub Panels, infact the only subpanel that displays anything is the object (orange cube) subpanel.
3. This
After i clicked the x button, all the panels returned to normal
4. Now that line of text above that shows redering progress was nice enough to let me know that the renders were saved on each pc's .earlier both parts were saved as different images on the same computer, now both parts are on their respective pc's so in a long list of folders randomly named i found the file that was saved and peiced them together in natron to discover this
yep same problem that occured where textures are not linked or whatever. lets see if the same workaround works.
5. Although on surface im not seeing any difference yet, the total size of the exr's that were saved on both the PC's is like 50 mb. when it's rendered on one computer (when the compositing also works) the size of the file saved is 500. i do remember in that long video you telling something about the file compression codec or something that preserves the detail and saves the size. while it is not yet an issue, for color grading it to death i will need that 500 mb file instead of the 50 one.
6. I packed all the textures into the blend file, and yet the textures from the other render seem to be missing, this is not something that happened in the 1.2.
Blender 2.79 , Windows 10 64bit
a Brief description of the file (before point 6)
it is saved on a shared server, the file has 1 group linked to it. but since 1.2 release i appended over the other group of objects instead of linking them. that group is the environment (which you see above) and its textures are located on the same shared server. now keep in mind that neither the file nor it's textures are in any of the machines local drive. and there's another layer called character and that is not appended, it is still linked, but unfortunately it only occupies the local half of the frame instead of the other one where textures dont work, so i can't tell if the textures on the linked objects work yet or not. i will test and tell results in the next post. MeanWhile @James please have a look.
Hi Pranavjit! You're not stupid at all :D. You've done a great service to the other users by posting about whats going on as it will force us to fix it and everyone benefits. So, let me serve you by addressing your post. Also my sincere apologies for taking so long to get back to you. I have no excuse -_-
1. Linked objects are going to be supported in 0.1.3. They're not supported in 0.1.2. The job was not well understood enough for us to put it in and we'd have rushed something that might not have worked.
2. This is a consequence of textures not being packed in and is caused by the same root problem as 1. above. External files, be they textures or other blend files, cache files are not automatically uploaded. You might be able to do a work around if you create blend files that link external files from a folder shared on your network. This way blender would store the same path on each machine that leads to the network drive location and as a result, all nodes would be able to locate the external files and render no problem. I've put up some resources to help with this. Though I haven't tested the method myself yet.
Here's a link to those resources -> https://www.crowd-render.com/single-post/2017/12/21/Resources-for-setting-up-Crowdrender
3. I think I might know what causes this crash, if you happen to have the compositor or node editor visible with the compositing nodes set as visible, then pretty reliably blender will crash. If you just have the default view visible, then it works, for me at least :D
4. Correct and correct, This is a current limitation. Sorry, I realise now that I said all settings in the render view are synced, but we did not manage to get border and crop to work. They will be supported.... ummm.... at some point. I can't say when as I don't think we'll be able to put them in the next version.
5. I think I get whats happening, the render progress is driven by the text output from the render process. This usually contains text like "Tiles Rendered 17/516" which we translate into how far each node is through the render. But, if you have more than one layer, that nodes might go through those 516 tiles more than once as it renders each layer and reports the tiles being rendered on each layer. But if you do manage to render a single frame and it does this, give us an e-mail! We want to know about it so we can fix it :D
Hope this helps and all the best for the Christmas break :)
4. It also seems that crowdrender completely disregards the render border and crop properties, i have the render border defined but it still goes ahead and renders the entire thing.
5. Sometimes it takes longer than usual on my machine to render, while rendering it bounces back and forth. one moment its rendered 24 % the next it shows 18 %, this back and forth thing happens a couple times, sometimes it reaches 100% and starts another render? but there's only one thing to render! what else are you rendering?