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Crowdrender completely broken for me.

I followed all the steps in the documentation, and here is where I am now.

I have 2 nodes and 1 client, on the client I have both machines and their IP Addresses connected.

One of the nodes (Windows) connects and says synced (on the node itself, the status doesn't show up on the host/client).

The other node (Ubuntu) doesn't show it's status on the node itself, nor the client.

Not only that, I had to create 3 nodes, because the Linux one kept changing it's IP to some random other IP address (that's not even on my home network), but I fixed that by creating a 3rd one and adding my Linux machine.

Then, every time I press the connect button on the client, the laggier and laggier Blender gets.

And finally, when I press render still, nothing happens at all. None of the machines do anything.

I'm using Crowdrender v0.2.5 for Blender 2.8x and 2.9x on all the machines, and all the machines are running Blender 2.91.0

Can anyone help with this? This project seems really cool, but it just doesn't work for me.

2 answers3 replies

5 Comments

James Crowther

Dec 09, 2020

Hi Jonas,

"This machine" refers to the status of the computer you're looking at. You can of course include the client in a render along with the other nodes on the network. You should always see it synced/ready since your blend file is hosted on the client machine (and copied to all other nodes when you connect).

If you don't see "this machine" synced, then you have a problem to be fixed there. Usually a sign that the addon has failed to start one of its background processes.

Also, forgive me if I am wrong here, but have you actually asked crowdrender to connect to each node? I re-read your last post a couple of times and you mentioned;

"I couldn't view the status of the other nodes, and what I mean by that is, in the documentation it says that I should be seeing the node's name, then the node status, then 3 different buttons. All I see is the node name and the buttons, even though they are apparently connected"

While its true that you should see extra buttons appear, this happens once you've asked Crowdrender to connect. Connection is (not yet) automatic. You mentioned that the tool tip said "ready to connect", which means the node is not connected, and you won't see those buttons until you click the connect icon (looks like a chain link), and then press OK to confirm the IP address. Once you click OK, Crowdrender then attempts to resolve the IP, or use the one you give it (be careful here, if you use the actual host name of the computer, then Crowdrender will overwrite the IP you gave it with the one it resolves from the hostname).

After resolving the IP address, if that happens, CR then starts connecting, it should then upload your file once connected, and finally confirm the node is synced. CR will time out if the node doesn't answer in 30 seconds. If that happens you'll see a message for that node that it "failed to connect".

You might have already done all that, if so, apologies for the wasted space here :) just thought it useful to go over the connection process... just in case!

Jonas Grill

Dec 10, 2020

Replying to

Well, I did click connect on the nodes, and it showed connecting on the bottom bar and didn't do anything else.

The Linux node's SSD did end up failing the day after I replied, so maybe there was just something corrupted on that end?

James Crowther

Dec 11, 2020

Replying to

@Jonas Grill ok, sounds like you were using things properly, and no, I generally avoid attaching any causation to correlated events like an SSD failing unless there's clear evidence that was having an effect.

So best steps now are to look for explicit errors coming from Crowdrender that might tel what the issue is.

Each node logs and prints status / error messages in a couple of places which are a good place to start tracking down what is going on.

So the first thing to do is to make sure there are no errors happening on startup. You can check for these by launching blender from a terminal/shell. Here's how:

on windows,

open a powershell by pressing the windows key and typing powershell. Inside the power shell, use the cd (change directory) command to find the blender exe. On my system its usually in:

C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.91\

Once in the director of the blender.exe, you can type

blender.exe

to start blender. You'll see quite a bit of text printed there. You can copy and paste that into this forum and I'll take a look.

On Linux,

Open a terminal, and do a similar thing to where blender is installed. Depending on where you've installed blender the location may vary, if you've installed blender via a package manager, you might be able to just open terminal and type 'blender' and it will run it.

Same goes, please paste the output here.

Crowdrender's Log files

The logs are fairly easy to zip, there's a button for it in Crowdrender's addon preferences. Just go to Blender > edit menu > Preferences > addons tab > crowdrender,

expand the addon and scroll down find the button that says "zip logs", pressing it opens a file save dialogue. The defaults are usually fine, they make a zip file on the desktop named after the host name of the system.

I'd recommend you make a support ticket for your logs as you can upload them there, which is more secure than posting them here. You can create a support ticket here >https://www.crowd-render.com/report-a-problem

James Crowther

Dec 07, 2020

Hi Jonas,

Ok, so a few things to check...

That you're running the same version of blender and the addon on each computer, sounds like you have different versions installed, so just make sure to check that they are all indeed the same version.
Make sure you only have one session of blender open on your clients and nodes. Crowdrender doesn't cope well with having multiple sessions of blender running at once.
Lag during connection is caused by the crowdrender addon doing a lookup of the name you give each node to see if there's an IP address associated with that node on your network. If its slow, chances are the lookup timed out which means it failed to find an ip address for that name. We attempt to resolve host names, so if you name your node something other than their host names, this will fail every time and time out.
Your version of the addon will sometimes have a problem resolving the correct ip address for a node when the client is running on windows. For some odd reason, windows can sometimes return a nonsensical ip address if asked to resolve node_name.local. We append .local to host names to help macOS find nodes, without which it fails sometimes. We removed this in V0.2.8 for windows so it would stop returning nonsense IPs for windows clients. You can get around this though, if you give the linux node a name that is NOT a host name on your network, then crowdrender will not give it an IP address and you can enter one manually. Seems like you kinda did that already judging by what you wrote above.

Things that concern me is that you say the windows node shows synced, but on the host/client/master there's no status showing. The client/master, where you connect to other nodes and render from, should show that your nodes, after connecting, are synced.

The nodes themselves should not show anything. Crowdrender is bidirectional in that any computer can be both a client/master and a render node. If you see something showing synced on a render node, then this has nothing to do with sessions on other machines that might be using that computer as a render node.

It's difficult to be more specific to your circumstances without knowing more info. You might benefit from rebooting the computers and trying just one node to start with, see if you can get it to connect and sync, then render.

Jonas Grill

Dec 07, 2020

Replying to

Ok! So:

All the machines are running Blender 2.91.0 with Crowdrender v0.2.5, so there is no mismatch there.
When testing, I only had 1 instance of Blender running on both nodes and the client.
I had the names set as the device being used to render, but I'll change them to the hostname and see if that will fix the problem. (I was just manually typing the IP Address).
I did already have a different hostname for the linux one, on both copies of the node, but one of them kept changing itself. That bug isn't a huge deal though.

So, as for everything else: The place where I saw synced was under the "Render Nodes" section. On the Windows node it said "this machine: synced" and the Linux node just said "this machine:" and nothing else after that. On my client, I couldn't view the status of the other nodes, and what I mean by that is, in the documentation it says that I should be seeing the node's name, then the node status, then 3 different buttons. All I see is the node name and the buttons, even though they are apparently connected, as when I hover over them they say "active node" and they show up as "ready to connect" My guess is that it's just refusing to connect to the nodes. I know I have the IP Addresses correct, as my modem control panel shows the IP Addresses, and I'm able to connect with other services, like FTP and Samba using those IP's. The only thing I can think of, which seems to be an issue with lots of network based software, is that either my modem, or the render nodes, are blocking the connection in some way.

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