Does/will CrowdRender involve Cycles Viewport rendering support? I have a second machine with a graphics card but it isn't my preferred machine for working on - boosting viewport performance would be very helpful, but would be difficult to implement depending on how you've implemented the communication between master and child machines.
Another somewhat unrelated question is what data is sent between machines at what time? Are meshes stored pre-emptively before render time on the child machines? Are full images passed back to the master from children, or just individual groups of rays? I don't know the details of how cycles handles all that but was curious how it is implemented here - would allow for interesting new features.
Hi Roger, strange! Please let us know if you track down the cause, this could help others! Alternatively you could send us the packed file and we'll see if we can get it to work here on our systems?
Hi James, Yes, tried resyncing and then un-packing and re-packing. It thought it was because the HDRI was from another volume and not getting copied into the blender file but then I realised it was all of my textures not showing up. In the end I manually copied all textures to the same folder as the blender file and then packed. That worked and the render looks fine. Not sure why the packing wasn't working though... I'll try and find a solution. Might be a permissions issue with the mac...
Hi @roger after packing, did you resync all your nodes?
Did you ever resolve this? I'm getting the same issue with the environment map even though I have all files packed into the blender file??
Hi Doug, looks like you have an environment texture that is not packed into the blend file. External files aren't distributed by CR yet. This is a work in progress as its not entirely trivial to pull off in an elegant way.
Not sure why I am now getting a partially rendered image, all was working well a day ago with no changes made
Hi Chris! Thanks for posting :D
CR does not yet support view port rendering, will it? Yes, this is in our plans. But, its a goal that will take a lot of development time to pull off. Right now the addon is completely written in python and as a result does not require any modification to blender.
To interact with viewport rendering in cycles would require us to be able to hook into the cycles engine. But this is exactly the experience we want to provide eventually, so if you are keen to see this feature, get some friends to vote it up (like this post) which will increase our priority for working on it.
Right, onto your other question, data is sent as you edit it. All data in the blend file is initially transferred to the child machines (nice nomenclature there by the way!) when they first connect (unless of course they already have it from a previous session, uploads of the file are kept to the absolute minimum, only done when there is no other way to synchronise data between parent and child machines).
Once connected, machines render and pass back tiles of each frame that they are requested to render. So images, not rays as you mentioned.
Regarding the development of this, we're in alpha stage, so this is still somewhat experimental and we're open to suggestions for what the future features are, hence this section on the site, so if you have any ideas you'd like to share for alternatives to how we currently deal with the results of renders, I am all ears!
All the best
James