Hi Steve, apologies for not getting back to you, I've been looking at your log files though. What is puzzling is that the log files show that the frame numbers of the animation are increasing which suggests that the render node is rendering successive frames of the animation. However, what may occur is that the animation data could be missing from the render node, causing it to render the same frame over and over. This has happened to me. The fix for this is to do a resync which forceably uploads the blend file again which will include the animation data. If you could give this a try and let me know if it works, that would be awesome since if there is some other issue, i'd like to look into it straight away.

Thanks!

J

Hi James, I'm guessing I'm just out of luck trying to render animations then?

Thanks Steve :D

I've sent all the log files, the second one just a moment ago - through the bug reporting system you have. Thank you!

Hi Steve, just sent you a msg on facebook in response to your post, if you could post a bug report to our website that would be great, that way we can create an issue to be scheduled into either an emergency patch for you or in the next build.... hmmm probably both if we have to issue a fix! xD

So, single frame render works fine from work computer to work mac. Animation just renders the first image again and again. Single frame render from home PC to work PC over VPN works great! Render times are halved even though my home computer has a 1060 and work is a 980ti. Animation between the two machines does the same as with the Mac, just writes the first frame again and again.

James, I'm going to try it out tonight, on both my mac and the two pc's connected via VPN. Cheers!

Hi Steve, Just wanted to touch base again, have you tried downloading the official 013 release (new release out this week)? Hoping that the bug fixes that went in might have fixed your issue.

Okidoki, I emailed you the blend file

Ok, in this case, if you're ok with it, I need to see your blend file. To have a good chance of understanding whats going on we'd need to run the file through tests on our own systems. If we can get the same result, we can fix it :D.

Also, you're not being a pain :), this is our job to help you, we're happy to do it!

Sorry to be such a pain James, but yeah I did sync and resync :)

Hi Steve, can you try this, connect to the other machine, then press "resync" and then try rendering again. It may be that you've made a change that did not get synced to the other machine. Pressing resync uploads the blend file again which means both machines should have the same data.

James, no, just a regular file... been trying again today at work with my mac and pc and the stills render perfectly fine, but the animations - even just a simple box falling onto a plane, just render the first frame of the animaton for the duration I've set.

Computers are synced and everything...

Hi, are you using linked assets? It seems like the left machine is missing a model/mesh. This can happen if the model is not in the blend file but linked from another file. Crowdrender can't yet transfer external assets to each node. This is coming but right now you need to locate all linked assets/external on a shared network folder/drive, and then tell blender to use the assets from that location. Also make sure that the file paths you use can actually be used by all machines to successfully get the file.

Sorry for the inconvenient workaround here. We're going to fix this so its automatically managed for you.

All the best

JAmes

Trying on two PC's. So far, not working well... after 50 frames or so of animation I'll stop it and send you the logs and the movie file....

Great! Please let us know how you go, we've had others successfully do this and I'm keen to know how it works for you :D

Thanks for all your work on this James, super cool! About to try using it over a VPN from my home computer to work computer

Hi Semillerimages we got them! Thanks!

Thanks James! Logs sent! *steve

Hi Semillerimages, I hope you are well. If you can send us your log files, we can investigate this for you.

There is a tool that can automatically package all the addon’s log files into a zip file that you can then save to disk, ready for sending. The tool is located in the user preferences section of blender. If you open your user prefs and then go to the addons tab, then search for crowdrender and expand its entry in the list, you’ll see a button called “Zip logs”. Pressing it will open a "save file" dialogue box and you can rename each log file after the machine. If you can do this for each machine involved in the animation render, that will be great, we need to see the log data for each machine involved in the animation, master and render nodes included. 

You can send all log files to our info at crowdrender dot com dot au address :)