(I tried to post this as a possible bug report but must have done something wrong as I never got a confirmation or response - over a week ago now)
I have 2 machines:
Local: i7-6700K 4GHz/32gb/GTX1660Ti/Windows10 64bit Remote: i7-4770K 3.5GHz/32gb/GTX1660/Windows10 64bit
(both have the latest Nvidia drivers)
With crowd-render 2.0 I rendered a 500 frame animation. It took over twice as long as an F12 render & I found 4 or 5 blank frames.
After 2.1 was released I removed 2.0, installed 2.1 and tried again.
I switched to manual load balancing (0.6 for local, 0,4 for remote). Rendering still took as long - up to 19s per frame as before. The balancing seemed to have an effect, but there was a noticeable colour difference between (I assume) the locally-rendered and the remotely-rendered parts.
I also found that frame 2 was blank (I stopped the rendering after this frame).
On closer inspection of the logs (local attached, I couldn't attach the 2nd log) I found that in the local log Frame 0 was processed twice and Frame 3 wasn't listed (the missing frame was frame 2). The remote log seemed to be complete.
In one other test I had a frame with one part completely white.
I couldn't find any other reference to this type of result so maybe I have a system problem?
Phew, quite an answer, thanks very much James. To your points.
Colour differences:
Embarrassing but true, I am using an external HDRI and I didn't pack it into the blend file - I will correct that.
Speed:
Actually I did try to change the crowd-render settings on the local & remote machine to GPU (CUDA), but I got the impression that it sometimes got reset. I'll try again.
Dropouts:
I have a 1Gb wired network connection for the 2 machines - no WiFi. I'll run a few response time checks. I think I noticed a comment somewhere that you don't like IPv6? I keep switching it off but after OS/driver updates it sometimes gets reactivated. Could that have an impact? In the meantime I relasie I can just r-render the missing frames, there aren't many
I'll keep investigating.
John
Hi there,
ok, the colour differences I'll address first. Are you using external files at all, like textures, HDRIs or objects linked/appended from another file that might illuminate the scene? If you are, then have you made sure that;
1. they are packed into the blend file? If they are;
2. when did pack them, before or after you had connected and uploaded your project to your other computer? If you add anything to your scene after you connect and upload, you should do a resync. Crowdrender doesn't yet automatically detect and distribute external assets.
Speed problems next,
You say you did and entire animation and it was twice as slow? That is obviously not what's expected. We have lots of users getting faster renders, so there might be a problem here. Generally you should expect with any distributed rendering that acceleration follows a formula of;
render time reduction = 1/n
where n is the number of nodes, so 2 nodes = 1/2 the render time and so on.
This is what we get and what other users get when things 'work'. Clearly they don't seem to be working in your favour at the moment though.
My main suspicion as to what might have happened here is that you have possibly used GPU for your F12 render and the CPU for Crowdrender.
So if you were rendering on your GPU in cycles as a baseline, then you just connected and hit render animation in crowdrender, you are using CPU by default?
I know its annoying, but you have to set the render device per node in crowdrender. There is a menu for each node where you can set the render device.
Finally the blank frames, this is unusual, but can happen if a frame has errors. That is something we're actively working on and you should see improvements as we roll out our new system and official beta build next year. In the mean time, errors like this are mostly caused by poor network connectivity. Usually happens with wifi networks with a lot of interference where some critical messages containing commands or events in the render system get lost and aren't retransmitted.
Some things you can try here are, if possible, ensure you have good wifi signal, you can test if you do by doing a ping command between your nodes. You should get very low and consistent ping times. If you see large fluctuations or packet loss, then your network needs some love. Ethernet is usually way more stable and I'd recommend it for long animations. Its what the professionals use for sure.
That said we run most of our tests on wifi and it can work, but you have to be careful of how it's setup. There are also lots of factors not in your control, such as interference. For example, if someone uses the microwave, the 2.4GHz band of our wifi just dies, any frames being rendered at that point are probably not making it back to the client/master machine.
Of course, this is a shortcoming in the software, and we're fixing it. The aim is that nothing short of a neutron bomb will stop your render from completing. And if someone does happen to drop a neutron bomb on your office or house, then your render not completing is likely to be much less of a concern at that point.
Anyway, i hope that has helped. If you find this didn't fix the problems for you, please write back and provide whatever detail you can, we'll try to help you as much as we can.
All the best