Hi dear Crowdrender team, first of thank you very much for your hard work developing this great tool. I have been playing with it quite a bit and still can't find the answer to my question.
We are a small studio, and have about 25 blades at our disposal to render, I thought I could assign them, and each blade would render its own frame. It seems they more try to participate to creating one frame at a time which in certain cases is way worse than creating one frame per station. Our pipeline involves a lot of characters, baked through alembic, so serving all the data alongside texture for "tiles" of a same pictures is highly inefficient. The idea is to render through EEVEE and have a quite snappy render ...
Is there any way to set crowdrender for solely render over a local network, and only by assigning a frame per client ? the same way a "deadline", or "RoyalRender" would ?
Thank you very much for your time, and sorry if I missed something
Nico.
I'm sure you have. Good for you. I, too, have rendered out one animation with this tool. It was much more work than just, for example, putting the file in blender on the different machines and rendering a group of frames on each. The slices had lines in them. Horrible for animations! I looked around and finally came to answers, which took me two days to find.
The render managers that have performed best for me are the kind that give you the choice of slices or an image per node. This makes for a useful tool with troubleshooting as it is very straightforward.
I can appreciate the slicing for large images. Seems most appropriate. But for an animation is is not serving me well. I even saw a blurb about the software that stated it was a design decision that may not have been the best. Agreed.
Perhaps this is a larger reason why funding is slow; this one thing leaves a Blender tool in 2.79-times. This keeps the tool outdated before it even gets out. For single frames, splendid; for animations, an obvious hassle.
Funding would probably be helped with this coming sooner than later. The 'crowd' using the tool will probably speak a lot louder and more positively about it if so.
Yes, this feature if long overdue. Would you happen to have any news on this?
Thanks.
James, thank you so much for taking the time to answer, and doing it so fast ! it speaks to the quality of your user service which is also a huge asset. I totally understand your situation and I am really excited to see what you'll come up with. I am the senior TD for an animation studio here in Japan, and I decided to switch production on Blender, which is a huge bet by itself but I believe it is a tool that will rise fast. None the less, we have deadlines to meet that is true but I think we also have to be supportive of what may be the solutions for tomorrow. If we could help you in any ways and benefit from beta testing whenever the time comes ... you can count us in !
Hi there Nico, great to see your post here. Ok, so the story with this is that we built our render distribution with a single method for distribution, that is one frame is rendered by all nodes until it is complete.
However, we realise our mistake in not making the render distribution more flexible. We're now working on the next generation of our addon which includes different methods of distribution. This might be a while coming though. Our situation has changed a bit and we're now trying to raise crowd support to help us move from our day jobs to working back on crowdrender full time, or as much as the support allows.
The beta for our new addon is already being coded. Its a pretty major overhaul to address your and other user's feedback.
I realise this probably isn't what you were hoping for, we'd love to help you take full advantage of tall that juicy hardware you have! I have to admit, I'm pretty jealous of your 25 blades!
If you find another way of rendering though, I'd completely understand, you have deadlines I imagine!
Just know that if you wanted to help support development, you'd be first inline to get the new beta ;) We're always happy to work with studios this way.
All the best
James