Hi all,
I hope this is appropriate to post here - if not, mods feel free to delete.
In short though, I recently set up a CR node using Docker - and found the process a little bit challenging. So I wrote up a short guide/some things I learned on my website; maybe they will be useful for anyone else trying the same thing:
Part one is getting the Docker host ready with CUDA support:
Part two is running CrowdRender:
I hope it helps someone!
Cheers,
Tim
this is a great read @tim.walls , here are a few of my thoughts:
1. first I apologize for the very bad timing, but I just updated all my images to Blender 2.83 LTS after I finally could fix the stupid "GPU does not get used for some unknown reason" bug
2. the switch --runtime nvidia is deprecated and - while it still works - should not be used anymore. The replacement is --gpus all
3. if you want to see the logs of the start script, you can use
docker logs -f <name of container>
the name of container is what got specified with --name
4. the missing audio device bug is very weird. To me this happened only on Ubuntu based systems, on my Debian 10 render server that doesn't happen. It is weird, because when using -noaudio it should get ignored....
5. Eeevee does produce black images, because Blender does not support Eeevee on headless systems. They need an Xserver and an attached display for some OpenGL stuff, all workarounds I have tried so far produced completely broken images (not black ones though...)
Blender devs said, that they are working on a solution, albeit with a low priority.
6. why do you pass --rm to the run command? Normally there shouldn't be a reason to create a new container on each start
7. the start script does download the addon on the first start, but once downloaded it does reuse it. So you only connect to the CR server once.
Sadly as long as the CR addon is not openSource, there is no other way for me to do that.... :(