I am testing out crowd render and all is fine when I render a still. When I made a 5 frame test for an animation part of it is rendering the animation but it is also rendering the first frame for every frame over top of the animation. Not sure how to correct this if it is on my side. thanks,
val
Hi val, yeah, that is a bit weird. Off the top of my head I can't say why your system did this! This may have been captured in your logs. CR saves logs to your hard drive for each computer that renders. So if you can send me those we can investigate!
The logs can be auto packed into a zip file. You can find this tool in blender user preferences > addons tab > Crowdrender. Expand the crowdrender addon in the list and you should see a button called "zip logs". This will let you zip the logs for that machine. If you can do that on each machine and send me the logs for each computer we can try to investigate what is going on.
You can send logs to our info e-mail address (info at crowdrender dot com dot au)
Hi Val,
Thanks for sending me those logs files. So, like we spoke about earlier today, the problem is that you connected, synced, and then changed the animation data of the scene.
Unfortunately the current alpha (at time of writing v018 to anyone reading this in the future ;) ) does not track animation data. So when you added your animation, this was not picked up by the addon, so it wasn't given to the other computers. Therefore they rendered the correct frames, but without the animation, resulting in the image you posted.
The workaround for this, is to do a full resync if you add animations. This will ensure all the animation data is sent to each node.
The best way to use crowdrender right now is to assume that unless you've made changes to existing data in the scene, that it hasn't been sent to the other computers. A resync or waiting until you've finished animating, texturing, modelling, etc to connect, is a good idea.
We're now working on the beta design. We're looking to track almost everything, including mesh edits. This will be rolled out slowly as we build and test each part.
Thanks for your patience with us!
James
Has this been resolved for v0.2.1 for Blender 2.80? I've been saving the blend file and clicking the Resync button in CrowdRender, but am always getting just the first frame rendered repeatedly. If I render directly in Blender just on the local machine without CrowdRender, the animation works perfectly. I've also tried saving the blend file, exiting and re-starting Blender, and then re-loading the blender file. Still just the first frame repeatedly.
Or am I missing something something in the "full resync"?
This is Blender 2.80 (Windows 10 for the main machine, and Ubuntu 18.04 for the nodes. NVIDIA Quadro P4000 for the main machine and NVIDIA Quadro P1000s on the nodes.
Crowdrender looks to be *awesome* if I can get this resolved.
Many thanks.
@ckryanco Hi there, if you do a full resync, then no, that should work. There is just one button on the interface of crowdrender to do this, so its unlikely that you've not been resyncing properly. It sounds like you've been doing the right thing.
It might be easier for us to troubleshoot this if we can do a conference call via Skype and you share your screen with us, that way we can see what is happening. It saves a lot of back and forth via e-mails or forum posts. If you are happy to do that, just reply here, then we'll try to setup a time to call you.
All the best
Thanks, James.
I've been continuing to test this, and find that the animations work fine if they are keyframe-based. The ones that are only rendering the first frame are physics-based: a simple dropping/bouncing ball, and a baked fluid simulation. Is there an issue with those types of blend files? I don't see any references to that in the documentation.
Much appreciated..