My train emitting smoke seems all good with Crowd-Render except for the smoke.
It is baked in Physics . As far as I can see everything else is fine.....but no smoke in
"Still" or "Animation."
PS I could not get into Forum with my email or Password....got in through the link in
the "Welcome" letter.
Hi Warwick, glad you made it in regardless of how! The password you have is just for the operation of the addon and your cloud account (should you wish to use AWS computers along with your own). The username and password for the forum will be phased out eventually. I just need to find time to get to that!
As for your animation, it seems to me that the physics cache is likely not in the blend file. Also, the timing is critical here for external data like physics caches. Usually they are generated outside of blender, the reason for this is that they get very big, very quickly as you can appreciate. So they are not normally stored in the blend file.
As a result, if the data is not in the blend file, it won't be distributed to the other computers. This is a pain that we're trying to fix. For assets like textures and even other blend files, blender allows you to pack assests into the blend file. But for cache's, its not always practicel due to size. Esp if you want to make changes to the file and then upload them somewhere.
So you have a couple of options here, either;
1. manually transfer the cache files to each computer you want to render
2. reconfigure your project to generate the cache files in a shared location that each computer can access. This may be a network drive or shared folder. Either way, be aware that having the files on a shared location will increase the render time since the cache files will have to be transmitted to each machine at render time. If your network is fast the delay may not be a big impact for you. Also physics caches have one file per frame so you're not going to need to worry about the whole set being transferred at render time.... I hope anyway!
Let me know if this helps! Keen to make sure you get the best from our addon :D