Hi there and thank you for this excellent add-on that covers a big missing hole in Blenders work-flow.
I'm mostly in Architectural and Product visualization and my machines are 100% Linux, at least for the moment, so there are some special needs here.
My observations-problems so far:
1. No visual feedback while rendering. I'd love to have a clue whats going on so I can cancel the render if something goes wrong.
2. All my textures, hdris and props don't transfer correctly.
Although they are in a shared folder in one of my machines, I get the P.S.O.D. (Pink Screen Of Death).
Even changing my paths to relative and soft-linking with samba doesn't do much at all.
3. Sometimes I get contradictory messages for syncing, where the pop-up claims that syncing was successful while the panel claims that the syncing failed (in my case the latter is truth).
4. The instructions for starting CR on a headless (Linux) machine seem outdated, are there any newer instructions?
Thanks once again and I'm eager for future releases.
Hey, no problem, also apologies, I submitted my comment without the link I meant to give you. If you check it now, its got the link to our resources section where there is info on how to setup shared drives for linux based systems.
Thanks for the super fast answer!
I'm doing my reading now on how to set-up file sharing correctly.
Cheers!
Hi there SunBurn, firstly, you're welcome! Let me take you through what we're working on with regards to each of your requests/observations above :)
1. Visual feedback during rendering. This is currently being worked on. Planned for release in 0.1.3 which we're aiming for mid to late February now.
2. Textures, HDRIs and props that are hosted in files external to the blend file you are working in will not be automatically transferred. You can, however, still use external props, textures and even physics caches with crowdrender. What you need to do is setup a location on your network that all your computers can access. Then place all your external assets in that location and reference them using an absolute path that will work on each machine. Check out out blog post -> Resources for help on setting up the shared folder if you're not sure how to do that.
3. This is a bug, we're working on some bugs for 0.1.3, but honestly I don't think this one is scheduled for that release. I have experienced it myself and rest assured I want to fix it! However we have to be disciplined to not put too much in each build so that we don't release it on time. This one we will get around to, at some point :)