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Doesn't render textures on synced laptop.

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.

11 comments

11 Comments

James Crowther

Oct 27, 2019

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 :)

James Crowther

Oct 27, 2019

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 :)

James Crowther

Nov 06, 2019

Replying to

@mark Yep, we've been thinking of a similar solution to what you've suggested actually. I also dislike the bloated blend file. As you have put it, there needs to be a dialogue for this, and it needs to be optional too. There are plenty of folk who would not use this feature and would probably find it very troublesome if our software automatically transferred all the assets without being asked!

But for people in your and Tim's position, it nicely solves the issue of the paths being incorrect if you use NAS. Bear in mind though that you'll need to re-push any file you change, much unlike a NAS/shared folder solution where the data is always up to date and is pulled down to each node at render time.

There is a trade off here, the method you describe requires much less network bandwidth at render time, and might be faster too, but is less forgiving if you forget to update all your assets with a push. Our new version coming out will report all the render output from each node, so you will see missing assets, but you won't know if those assets are the latest version or not.

mark

Nov 08, 2019

Replying to

@James I guess you could potentially run a SQLite database on the host to keep track of render nodes assets by way of an md5 hash of each file across nodes? That way reporting which assets are on each device and alert before rendering? The alert could then offer to update only the nodes that are out of sync...

See the programmer in my head is working overtime!

Tim Feathers

Nov 15, 2019

Replying to

@James and @mark, thanks for the replies. I was able to fix the problem (yes somewhat painfully using relative paths), but not bad. My 'fleet' is old headless linux servers already set up with ssh. I realized after that I could have probably just located the folder path up a directory and in one instead finding the correct hash.

mark

Oct 26, 2019

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?

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Doesn't render textures on synced laptop.

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