Hi there,
stumbled upon crowd-render.com some days ago an i´m really interested in this project. ^^
The past few years i was using cloud storage like OneDrive and the "placeholders" feature to render frames across PCs in different locations. Not the best solution sometimes but works nonetheless.
My understanding so far is that the output settings can be as usual via the Blender setting and crowdrender distributes the frames and / or tiles between the machines i have? So is it possible for example that i put baked fluid cache files on my OneDrive account for all machines to access and the frame distribution is done by crowrender? Is this possible in that way or are the cache files somehow uploaded to the cloud and where will the finished frames be saved?
So many questions. :-)
Thanks for your help.
Best regards,
Chris
Yes, my prefered method over the past years rendering via OneDrive are relative paths, also for the output settings. Works like a charm most of the time. The upload to OneDrive indeed can take some time sometimes. Few weeks back i did a fluid simulation that consumed nearly 100 Gig of physisc data. Luckily i have a fast connection most of the time, but nonetheless this is a lot even for today. ^^
Anyway, thanks for your detailed explanation to my questions. Looking forward to the crowd-render beta even if it may take some time.
Best regards,
Chris
Hi There! This is possible, though I think you'd need to setup your project carefully. Blender will store the path to the cache folder as it is on your master computer, so if you use absolute paths then you'll likely get errors or missing assets in the scene. The reason is that the other computers which are only rendering are not guaranteed to have exactly the same path to the cache folder.
You can of course manufacture a situation where each computer has the same path to your one drive, if you have a user on each machine that is exactly the same and each machine runs the same operating system. This will give you (hopefully) identical paths on each system to your one drive folder and then the cache folder within.
Another solution I have tried is using Blender's relative path setting and placing the blend file and cachce folder inside the one drive folder, well, in my case it was a dropbox folder. The only issue with this is that each time you make a change to the file and save it, it will upload the file to synchronise it and you'll get a lot of bandwidth being consumed which can slow down fetching the rendner results. If you have a big file this solution may not be for you! It depends on the internet connection and how well behaved one drive is.
Finally, we're again working on our beta version which does aim to automate the process of distributing and syncrhonising external assets such as caches. They are a tricky beast to master, however, a smoke simulation can take only a few minutes to upload but can be several GB in size and on Australian internet can take half a day to upload! So we're not going to be releasing this anytime soon as there is a wide range of use cases to cover, which means we need to tread carefully on this one, but we're headed in that direction.
All the best and hope this answers your question.
James