Hi,
I can't use Crowdrender if my project has an animated texture.
I guess because even if I choose to add my external data into the .blend file this does not include my animated textures. So when the nodes render their part of the frame my animated texture is missing.
Is there a way around this?
I'll save every some life and frustration. Don't even bother with the above.
What they are basically recommending is to setup a network share and then use the UNC path name for everything. Which is *insane*. Blender uses drive letters, not UNCs and if you didn't set this up from the start you can watch his video as he fails over and over to see why trying to change it after the fact is even more a ridiculous and unnecessary waste of time.
If you aren't using video textures just go to file/external data/check pack it all; save to new file and you are ready to roll using that file. Unfortunately there is a bug with video textures and blender doesn't always pack the video file correctly so it gets pinked. You can use find missing files to fix this locally; but they still don't pushed up to CR correctly. <sigh>
So let's try doing network shares sanely. Share a work directory with all the project loaded on it. Give your UID full access (or "everyone" if you don't have to care) and mount it every where with the same drive letter (yes even the local machine - every node). I used R: for "R"ender. I also set my paths to absolute so it has to look on "R:" not "C:".
Open the project on "R:" in blender and it all just works. CR away without s single care or having to use python to hack you library paths. :)