Hi Daniel :) Yes, that is currently the expected behaviour, but the next pre-release for 0.1.3 will store the optimisation data so that each time you load the scene or resync, it will still be as fast as it can be :D. Stay tuned for the announcement as to when this version will be released to the early access testers. Should be in a week or so from now.

James

Hey guys,

i tried the load balancing on our gpu machines, and noticed, that the rendertime will get lower on every rendering. One machine with 2 and the other with 4 gpus.

Problem is, after recyncing the rendertime is back to high.

Cheers Daniel

Hi again! No worries as we say down under :D

Directory: I'm creating a task in our backlog now ref CR-227

Load Balancing: It should use CPU as a starting point, but then adjust on each subsequent render based on actual performance, so if you can verify you have the correct setup as per instructions above, try rendering a few times with a simply scene (for the sake of an expedient experiment!) to see which set of cards is actually quicker. Also as I said, Jez is working on making all the render settings update in real time. This will make the whole process easier. You'll be able to change the device used in the render settings panel to GPU/CPU without needing to re-sync your files. You'll just need to set the user preferences on each machine you use first to GPU and enable the cards you want to use. Then save. Sorry, its a bit fiddly right now :) We're working on making it better.

Sync: Great to hear that the pink went away after a resync. That check box doesn't sound too hard to implement. Let me have a think about this. On the surface it appears easy enough to implement, just want to have a good old think about what could go wrong!

EXR's: I'm creating a task for this ref CR-226

Lock: I gave this a go, locked UI indeed! Seems it stops everything when rendering with crowdrender. I guess this is a result of the way our addon works. I will need to do some further investigation. For now its safe to say its probably not a good idea to lock the UI and then render with crowdrender unless you enjoy clicking on paintings.

GPU and CPU: There has been much interest in us developing this already and so we've got an issue in the backlog already (CR-212 just in case anyone would like to know where its up to!). Stay tuned as we experiment with this. There are some extra things we need to add to the code to make this happen, first of all is that we'll need a way to adjust the tile sizing so its different for GPU/CPU since they won't like to share tile size, in my experiments GPUs work much better with larger tiles, which CPUs struggle to cope with.

Then there is the problem of how to make configuring all that nice and easy and not a terrible point and click adventure. Its in progress right now, you liely won't see it in the 0.1.2. release but it is def on the drawing board.

Awesome sauce!

Thanks for all the info! I'm glad some of the things I mentioned make sense to you guys. :)

Directory: I figured the custom directory wouldn't be terribly hard to realize, and I agree with putting it in the add-on preferences panel, seems like the most logical place following the example of other add-ons.

Side note: It would be nice if CR respected the directory set for rendering and not create it's own. Or if it has to do that it at least cleans up after itself. :) But I'm guessing that stuff is just there for debugging purposes currently. Especially, for bigger projects I try to keep a tight file-naming convention. If things need to be automated, I'll always know exactly where they are.

Load Balancing: It's a tricky issue indeed, one of the machines has a 4-core cpu and 2 gpus and the other is an 8-core with 3 gpus, so what I was seeing in terms of balancing would make sense if it's basing everything off cpu at the moment. But leveraging both AMD and Nvidia cards from both machines at the same time is interesting, to say the least. Once you have command line rendering setup, let me know as well. It's generally how I batch render scenes overnight, and it's faster than rendering in the UI.

If you'd like a big production scene that requires a lot of resources to test, let me know, I'd happily supply one. Once I get your email I'm sure we can chat more about it.

Sync: Yeah, I had a pink render, but after syncing it was fine. The point is just that I don't want to waste time clicking sync, or forgetting it when I pop off a render before going to bed and waking up to half a pink render. An "Auto Sync Before Rendering" check box would be enough to alleviate that I'd say.

EXR's: Thanks, a menu would be more than satisfactory! ;)

Lock: Yeah, it's a small button indeed. It's just a personal preference on my end, but knowing what's going on in the background would be nice.

Like I said though, it's looking pretty impressive already. You guys are on to something here! :D

And one other thing, how possible would it be to leverage both GPU and CPU power simultaneously, seeing that you're already starting multiple threads in the background? That would be insane.

Hi there :)

So, lots of great feedback there, thank you Mr Mantissa! I'm glad that overall you liked it :D. Now lets dive in!

Live updates

These are in the pipeline for sure. They're part of a planned overhaul of our core application that will resolve both integration with the compositor and drastically reduce overhead.

Custom Working Directory

Ok great :) this could be implemented by giving you an option in the addon's user-preferences panel. I'm thinking similar to how blender currently has settings for things like paths to scripts in the user_preferences. If users are used to going there for configuring where blender stores files, then this option might be best placed there. Putting it in the render settings panel might cause clutter since once you set this, I doubt you'd need to set it each time you use crowdrender, so it would be of little value having immediate access to.

Not a big edit for us really, the cr path is currently hard coded to be the expanded user path. Its easily switched to something else, I'd need to edit the layout of the user preferences panel for our addon.

GPU Load Balancing

Hmmm, ok this is a little odd, I'd like to look into this, I think I am going to send you a separate e-mail, but for the benefits of others that may read this thread, here's how the load balancer works, and how to get crowdrender to actually render with GPUs, since we haven't released a how to on how this works yet :D

First, the load balancer initially calculates the workload of each machine based off CPU cores. This is due for replacement in the overhaul, but for now its used as the starting point, and for GPUs its not relevant. The first time you render, esp using GPUs, it won't be well optimised. However each time after you render (from the start of your session) the load balancer calculates the relative processing speed for each machine. It then uses this to figure out how much work each machine can do and finish at the same time as each other.

Second, we're working on better support for GPU rendering, I think we're getting there. But for now, you'll need to follow these steps

1. First, you need to make sure that GPU is saved in your user preferences-> system as the compute device you want to use.

2. Then you also need to make sure that GPU device is also selected in the render properties panel.

3. Connect to your machines using crowdrender.

4. If these computers you are connecting to have already once been connected to using this blend file, you should do a resync. The GPU device setting is not yet tracked and uploaded automatically so if you originally used CPU as the device then all the computers you connect to will use CPU and your local machine GPU. The same goes for tile sizes. I know I know its annoying, that is why Jez is fixing this so all render settings will be updated live, including tiles and the Device used in the render settings panel.

Background Sync / Auto Sync

Hmmm, so you'd be ok with doing a complete sync before rendering, am I reading you correct? I get the feeling you have tried something and it hasn't worked resulting in a pink render! At least judging by that comment anyway! So, what is supposed to happen is that we track all the data in the scene to make sure that if there is a difference that would result in a pink render, the computers in that state would signal this by showing "Sync fail" as their status in the crowdrender panel.

If all nodes are showing "synced" and you render and get missing textures or other pink bits then there is a problem with the tracking system and I'd like to know more so I can fix it :)

DWAA EXR's

Yeah I hear you! So I can certainly make it so you have other options available to you. And by now I am starting to feel very jealous that you have a wired network :D. Yep, a menu for this would be no hassle, just where to have it would be the trick, I am leaning more towards having it in the crowdrender panel proper so its readily available.

Locked UI / Fullscreen Rendering

I am a little embarresed to admit I had to look this up, and then had to stare hard at the render panel for a bit until I saw the lock icon. This is why we do community testing, there are always features used by artists that we've never used (or sometimes sheepishly admit that we've never heard of).

I will test with this setting and see what happens on my system since I am curious about it now I know its there!