I have a train emitting smoke animation (Baked)....all is good on the Parent computer but when I use Crowd-Render I lose the smoke.....both in "Render Still" & "Animation." I have packed the files......
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Hmmm. this is probably a path issue if the rendering is working on the master/client machine. Probably a bit late for Warwick (sorry about that mate).
A simulation gets baked, and the data is stored somewhere, for fluid/smoke, usually in a folder. The problem is on each computer you want to user for rendering, that folder doesn't exist.
The best solution for this is to setup a shared folder that all your computers can access, and make sure Blender bakes the cache to THAT folder. Otherwise the other computers have no way of knowing how to get to the cache.
A shared folder can be setup pretty simply on most OS.
The tricks to get crowdrender to work are mainly in setting up the way your computers access the shared folder.
If you're lucky, or reasonably astute with computers, you'll have all of them running the same operating system. Take windows as an example, most professional studios we talk to about this, already have setup a shared folder and map it to the SAME drive letter on each computer they have.
This way, if your cache is stored on the shared drive, and the drive letter is X, then the following path should work on each computer if they all have mapped the share to that letter.
X:\assets\simulation caches\myproject cache
The trick with Blender here is to
Make sure blender on your master/client machine is using 'Absolute paths', by default Blender will attempt to use relative paths. An absolute path is like the one above, it starts from the drive letter. A relative path will start from the blend file, and ultimately this is useless to the other computers.
Tell Blender to bake the cache to the X:\assets\... etc path. This way Blender does two things, it puts all the cache on your shared drive, and, it saves the location to that cache as X:\assets\simulation... etc
Connect to your nodes with crowdrender and resync them. There's a button for this in the crowdrender panel. This takes a fresh snapshot of your project and publishes it to all your nodes, including the change to the location of the simulation cache.
Any issues, probably best to email, this forum is old and broken and we want to get rid of it. We don't get email notifications of new posts. Despite asking our web hosts (We used Wix to build part of our website, including this forum, we recommend YOU DONT!) about this, nothing seems to have changed.
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