I have been 'playing' around with Blender for a few weeks now, trying to find a good renderer and render farm software for architectural designs exported as Collada files. Although Blender 2.8 imports them 'ok-ish', rendering scenes takes a lot of time.
After some research, I found crowdrender which 'looks' promising and even decided to pay to get the latest build.
I built my own render farm with my main system and three subordinate systems which 'should' work according to documentation and youtube videos.
I have run a couple of tests with crowdrender and am impressed with the concept, but the outcome is not what I was hoping for. Here's a render of a very simple bathroom scene as a test: The far right shows about 5% of the job, and it was sent to my local machine that has 8 cores. I am not concerned with the color and lighting differences as that is probably due to differences on the individual systems, namely the Filmic Color Management system, but that system is my most powerful and should have received the highest priority! Then only the top half of the remainder was returned from a laptop that only has 2 cores and 4GB RAM (My least powerful system). The other two systems???... never returned any part of the image.
Load balancing doesn't work as only one of my three subordinate systems actually displays as 'online' or 'ready' in blender, but when I send a Render job, all three subordinate system's CPU usage pegs out.
Hi @jwc1410 ok, something is definitely not right here. First, Crowdrender doesn't split the frame horizontally, so I am baffled as to how you ended up with this!
Secondly the power difference is likely due to the way the, soon to be replaced, load balancer works right now. We thought we had a good solution for load balancing that tries to predict how much of the screen to give to each computer. However, its takes a few frames to properly 'learn' how fast each computer is compared to every other computer. As a result, you will get weird tile allocations like this, especially if you have already rendered something and then you add another node (the new node effectively gets a tiny portion of the scene to 'test' the new node before loading it up).
So, as a result, if you're doing single frame renders, you're best bet for good allocation , is to either use manual mode on the load balancer, which lets you allocate the amount of the frame each node gets, or to do some low sample or resolution test renders before you commit to a high res full render.
Ok, moving on the lighting differences, there shouldn't be any, you might find if you press the "resync" button on the Crowdrender panel, that the problem goes away. Resync will upload your blend file again, uploading any changes you might have made to lighting or colour management.
Finally, going back over the missing part of the image, I had a thought, are you using the border to restrict where the rendering is happening? This is one potential cause. You can tell if you have bordered rendering on because when you switch to the camera viewpoint you can see a red dashed line around the camera frame. I'd love to know how this has happened.
Also just acknowledging your support ticket you had open for another issue, I'll be responding to that now so stay tuned for that.
Wishing you all the best
James