As you can see, the synced laptop renders the objects, but didn't render the textures or the hdri. All the textures are 100% procedural except the map used to mask the frosted glass, a displacement map to make condensation on the glasses and the hdri. This is my fifth attempt and it has happened every time.
Hi,
I just found that I need to 'File->External Data->Pack All into Blend' before I could get textures rendering across multiple nodes.
I'm still having trouble with video textures though if any one can chime in and help?
Hi Mark, I've never used video textures before, after looking around on the net, it seems that video textures and image sequence textures are not packed in the blend file. Not sure why they are treated differently but here's the page from the blender manual -> https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/files/blend/packed_data.html
So, what are the options in this case? Really your only option is to put the files on a shared location, this would mean making a folder accessible on the network and putting the files in there. Then you'd need to edit your blend file, changing the location of the video textures to the new shared location. There may be a performance penalty for doing this, depending on your network speed since it will be slower, a lot slower in fact, for your computers to access the video textures via your network, even if you have gigabit speeds.
That said, you'll probably still find it faster to distribute the render over multiple machines with a shared folder solution to this problem than rendering on just one machine if the compute power of each machine is similar.
Hope this helps :)
I've run into this issue animating with video. James, so I can't scp or rsync across all my servers to a location and make paths relative? looks like some renaming and such going on in the cr folder.
@Tim Feathers this is the issue I found - cross platform crowd rendering with a unix server in the middle causes path issues - get it right for a OSX and the WIN pc's cant read the path and vice versa.
@Tim, Mark is correct in that if you are using a mix of OS in your fleet of machines, you might not be able to get them to sync from a central repository on a NAS or shared folder. but.....
A solution for this might be to use relative paths, and manually (and somewhat painfully too) transfer the necessary files to each server and locate them next to the blend file. Blend files are tagged in Crowdrender with a unique id which is found with a little help from the python console.
This id is used as the folder for your project on render nodes, so if you can find the id for the project you're talking about, then you can search for this folder in your cr/server/ folder on each render node and you'll be able to find the corresponding blend file (they are all called svr.blend, so don't be concerned if after opening the folder, you can't find your blend file according to the name you gave it originally).
You can then place all the necessary assets next to this blend file, and if you have setup your project to use relative paths, then you can render on that machine and the assets should be able to be located no probs.
Dear @iamjustsyd what @mark mentioned in his first comment is correct, you need to pack your image texture into your blend file, then you will need to make sure you are connected to your other nodes in crowd render, finally after packing the textures, saving your blend file, and being connected to all your computers in crowdrender, press the"resync" button to automatically re-synchronise the blend file with each computer.
This should fix the problem of the missing image textures, also if you find that this causes the computers to not sync (sync fail), then you can simply re-open the blend file by going to Blender -> File -> "revert". You should not close blender at all, this is unnecessary, doing a revert normally fixes any sync fail issues after you have resynced the file. If you still have problems, try re-opening the file instead.
Hope this helps :)