Hello,
so i have first time testet the crowdrender addon. First, i would say thanks guys for your work and time spend in this project.
I have three pcs at home. Because i always run out of vram by my projects, so i render normally with cpu.
The first problem was syncing the pcs. I had already installed the newest Blenderversion 2.79 at my workingpc. Then i installed the same version at the other two machines. They didn´t want syncing. As i installed all my addons and personally preferences at the other two machines (i copied and pastet the user preference folder from my working pc) it works and all synced.
Then the first try.
this ist the refrence render. Dont´t look at the headlight, it was only a quick testrender an i have forgotten to give the light a texture. It tooks about 10 minutes to render with my workpc with cpu.
Here the render with all three machines: It tooks about 9 minutes
As you can see, the enviroment lighting is there, but no textures at the renderclients. I think the part with textures is the local machine. I don´t know how and i couldn´t fix this until now.
But the next problem i will show you:
You see, this render tooks only about 8 minutes. There are even no textures at the lift part, but this render was with only two machines. And it tooks less time then that with three machines. Why is that? Now, the third pc, the Laptop has a lower cpu. I think the crowdrender addon took the image, divide it into pieces and then the clients render it out. But it seems this happens not dynamically. When one pc is ready, he do nothing.
For example: The teamrender feature by Cinema 4d. There render all cores of all renderclients simultaneous at the picuter (in case of a still). If you have f.e. the cpu`s with each four cores, then there are 12 buckets at the picture by rendering. So it doesn`t matter when one machine is slower than another, because the faster machine can render simple more buckets.
By the crowdrender addon in my case it is better, to disable the slower pc, as you can see, when i render it out with two equal machines, i have the best rendertime, because the slower machine doesn´t breake out the render.
Whats with the texture? I don´t know
So this was my first experience with the crowdrender. Since it is in develompment, there will sure comes huge improvements in future.
best regards
Mike
Hi Gopper, great work :) I also think I have found what is causing the problems with sync. We'll be releasing a patched version of the pre-release to all the registered testers next week after we've done some more testing on it.
Hello again,
so, here is the final render from the bike in a real scene. I renounced of the post production, because i think its going mainly around the renderings. The picture below is the reference render, it tooks about 6.18 Minutes.
then i rendered it with the same machines then described in the top of the threat. Here it tooks 4.48 minutes to render. Then i rendered the same picture without any changes again and it tooks only 4.08 minutes. So it works with the correct delivery of packages to the different machines.
I must restart the pcs a view times, because i had trouble with the sync. The Laptop freezed by 1 percent sync, and the other pc didn´t get a connection. But after a few restarts it works.
So so far with my first render.
Hi, yes, we're not there yet, but this is planned, so many people have asked for it we dare not ignore them. 0.1.2 will be released without this but we're looking at it for a future release. Stay tuned. :D
By the way, is it in future releases in planning that i can see the progress of the render in the pictureviewer, so how it is when i render it normally?
You're welcome and yes please! Would love to see the finished image :). Happy to help out with it if you have any more issues too.
Ah, ok, when i get at home, i will try it again. Thanks alot for the fast anwer. So then i must searcht the texture for the headlight :)
Hey Gopper! Thanks so much for posting, First the pink bits, you need to pack into blend file all your textures and then do what we call a resync, you need to hit the button that the red arrow is pointing at (see image below). This will send the file again to all the connected nodes and they will then have the textures packed into the blend file.
Second, the speed, have you tried doing more than one render of the image? The load balancer is really good when you do animations, we're improving it with a future version that will work similar to what is in C4D as you described, but for now it takes two to three renders before the load is balanced properly. You could try doing renders at a lower resolution to help the load balancer learn about your computers and the scene. Then you would be able to increase the resolution for a final render which should be perfectly balanced. If not, feel free to write a bug report and please include your files so we can investigate. You can report a bug at https://www.crowd-render.com/report-a-problem.
If you can get the textures to work, would you post this image again in this thread with the render as it should be?
It would be awesome to share your work :D I like the bike!
Location of resync button