I have a scene with fire and smoke in a domain. I have another scene where I placed a cube and a light. When I render the cube and light, it works. When I render the fire and smoke, I get a black output only. Since I was able to get output from the basic cube and light scene, I cannot explain why I get nothing from my actual scene.
I am using cycles and so far nothing complicated that I know of. I am using nodes to create the fire and smoke and I have some nodes for compositing as well. I have no sync errors either. I have made sure to pack all in the blend file. I have watched all the videos and tried searching for the past 2 hours to figure this out. Any help would be appreciated. I do plan on backing this project if I can get it to work for me. I have a huge render to do in the next month and I am attempting to speed things up a bit.
Another thing, when I render locally using f12, I get the expected output.
Hi Michael,
So if I understand you correctly, you have successfully rendered the mesh of the cube, but the smoke and fire do not show up? Are the cube and light in the same scene as the fire and smoke or are they separate? Are they in separate files altogether?
If you have created physics data for the fire and smoke, is this stored internally or as an external cache? Packing files does not include external physics caches as far as I know so if you have an external cache, it will not be in your blend file, and will therefore not be transferred to the other render nodes which could explain why your render is black.
So, please let me know the file structure of your project using the fire and smoke, show the folder for the physics cache if there is one. Let me know whether you use absolute or relative file paths in your project. Chances are the problem is the render nodes not having access to the required cache. First thing would be to try to diagnose why.
Looking forward to hearing back.
I created 2 different files to test with. So the cube and light was 1 file and the fire/smoke was another. yes it does have baked physics cached, so I could have those files available to the other machines. I do not know how to do that though. are the paths relative somehow? Do I need to open the same file on the other machine and bake the physics there? I am new to this whole thing, so I am unsure of the steps necessary to link the external data. What you are saying makes total sense to me though. I really appreciate the reply.
ok. I found a similar thread. https://www.crowd-render.com/forum-1/_bugs/smoke-problem
I tried setting the baked cache location as external and set up a share that both computers are accessing. I also loaded the blend file in the other machine and the cache is rendering locally. This was a test to make sure they both had access.
I am pretty sure that is the wrong thing to do though. I still get the same blank render output. 1 thing I noticed was that even on the local computer that i am using as the master, it still renders blank. 1 section of the render shows first, and I think this is the master finishing what it rendered. Then a few moments later the rest loads from the remote machine. If I turn off the other machine in the crowdrender interface and render with the master only using the crowdrender "render still", I still get a blank render. Does the plugin not have access to the bake cache?
OK. I think I finally have it working, at least locally and will test the farm later. I accidentally figured out how.
I set up the preferences for blender to point to all the relative folders I could think to do. The temp folder has to be mapped on each machine to a path that is relative to it.
the render cache is set to a location within the project as well. This folder needs to be in several locations before rendering.
The crowdrender settings could be changed, but I had issues with doing this and it would not load after trying to change the path.
Under the physics cache settings, I disabled the "use the library path" setting and enabled "external".
Output is also changed to a sub-folder of the project. This way everything is contained within 1 project folder other than the crowdrender folder location.
After baking physics, copy the folder that generated to the root of the project folder. Change the name of the folder to the name of the auto generated temp blend file that shows up. Maybe you can change this auto generated temp blend location, but not sure where.
Paste the same folder in the subfolder under the temp directory that generates. There will be a temp.blend file. rename the folder pasted to blendercache_temp.
With this setup, I was able to render my scene locally!! I tried just adding the folder to the temp location and renaming. That did not work. I tried only pasting in the root and renaming to the auto-generated name for the temp blend that shows there. That did not work. It needs to be in both locations before it renders correctly. I figured that having it in more than 1 place was extraneous for the local render. So I deleted it from 1 location. This is how I accidentally found out it had to be in both places. I switched to make sure it was necessary.
Now I need to test the same setup on the network nodes. Then I can work out a script that copies and renames the files more automatically than having to manually copy and rename everything every time. I am sure that the manual process will still be less time than attempting to go without the added nodes. As long as I can get the farm working, I can move forward on this project.
Going to go get some GPUs and then I will be testing out, hopefully tonight.
ok. I think I have this figured out for real now. I kept running into issues with file locations and had to do so many tests to see what was actually needed for this to work for me. Currently, I have only tested with a fire and smoke scene, so other things may not be working yet.
To get the cache to work for my setup, I had to change the location of the crowdrender output folder. At first I thought this folder would also house the files needed for cr to load. Nope. the cr folder will always generate in the user folder on windows. But this is not an issue, just threw me off for a few minutes. as long as the folder pointed to for output is the same location on all the machines, then the next part will work.
The nodes need to have the cache moved to the server folder from the output settings. As long as all of the relative paths are set correctly on each device, then when it goes to render, it will look to the correct location. in my blender, I set the path for cache to \./Library/Rend/Cache. So I put the output cache from the master to the the library\rend\ folder and renamed it cache.
Now the node is ready to render.
On the master machine, the cache must be in the cache folder, but also in the base of the project file. When you open your project file and blender generates a random name for the temp blend file, you must copy the name of the temp blender file and rename the cache folder to this. Then the master machine is also able to render along with the nodes.
Once blender starts again, then you open your file and a new random temp name will generate and you need to remember to rename the folder again to use it in the farm.
Now that I have it working, I just need to practice the workflow. It is tedious and I wish blender had a way to transfer cache around without having multiple copies that get out of date and need to have their own way of keeping track of what is what. Otherwise, I have cut my render time down some. Now I need to dig in and tweak settings for best render times.
Hi Michael, great to hear, please keep going and feel free to post here if you need help :)
Hey. I've been struggling with my quick smoke render as well. I will say that the render happens SO MUCH FASTER while using CR so I'm super excited to have it! About the output paths matching... my node is running Ubuntu but my master is running WIN10 so I can't have *identical* paths for my node as my master. They're both set to output to the relative \tmp\ directory.
You kinda lost me on the "cached render paths" bit. When I add a cube to the scene, here's what happens: Half the scene will preview when my Master completes the render. A few moments later, when the node completes, the other half will show up in the preview. Then, a few seconds later, the whole screen goes gray. I'll try to GIF capture it and attach what's happening. (notice the smoke/fire doesn't render at all... but one step at a time, here.)
This project was created before installing CR. I have done a 'save as' and saved a new file with a new name. Any help would be super appreciated. Trying to render some fire elements to composite into a film. Thanks!! Nick
Here's what I recommend, first, try disabling the add-on, save blender's user preferences, then restart Blender so the crowd render addon is completely off.
Next, do an F12 render with your scene, and see if the problem persists, if it does, then the compositing node network or Blender is the source of the problem. If the problem doesn't happen anymore then try the next step.
Re-enable the addon and click the "START" button in the render properties panel, do another F12 render (so not using Crowdrender) and see if the problem comes back.
If all goes well, then do a Crowdrender render.
Let us know the results and if you can send us your log files and your blend file that might help us track this down. Please note you should use our info at crowdrender dot com dot au address to send those files to, so long as they're not bigger than 20MB or so compressed.
THanks!
Thanks so much for getting back to me! I disabled CR and restarted Blender (2.81). F12 render worked fine. Same issues happens after re-enabling CR and clicking "Render Still" With CR enabled, F12 render still works brilliant. I'm sending you my client_interface.log and render_logging_local.log files since those seem to be the only two which updated after my render -- along with my .blend file which is super small at this point since it's only a smoke domain and a cube. Cheers! Nick
Hi Nick, thanks so much for your patience, what you have unearthed is really helpful, turns out the new release of 2.81 has extra passes that we currently don't give you. I am going to schedule an update to fix this, its why your screen is turning gray. I just ran your file and got to the bottom of it pretty quick, so thanks for sending it to us!
This fix won't take me long, estimate it being turned around in about a week since its going to affect everyone using 0.2.2 and its pretty important as optix is a pretty epic new feature.
So sorry for that not working :( we should have you back up and running soon, as I said, this fix seems a fairly straight forward one, but we want to test so its working really well :)
I'll post back when you can test, you might even get an early build if you feel brave enough to test it before its been unleashed. If not, no sweat :)
See you in a bit
I'd love to help test it. I'm still just experimenting with multi-CPU renders so anything of great criticality is still rendered locally. Thanks for the quick response!
Hi Nick, an update,
I've fixed the problem in our code, I can now happily tell you what's gone on and give you some expectations when the build is going to be ready.
First, the problem was actually because of denoising. So, you can probably test your scene and run it on the current software you have, if you bypass the optix denoising node in your compositor setup.
Second, the problem you found means that 0.2.2 doesn't actually support optix denoising at the moment. The fix I built today adds support for the passes you need to plugin to the optix denoising node in the compositor.
Third, the problem also affected our addon, stopping it from supporting the new cryptomatte feature. That is also fixed as this image shows, I've been testing using the picker in this test and can pick and isolate different objects.
Hi guys, so there will be a new build, v0.2.3 which will fix the bug that caused the denoising and crypto matte passes to not appear in the compositor.
We do have to run a few tests to make sure the features are now working properly. We'd not actually used them before.
Since we've promised all who've signed up as life savers first access, the new v0.2.3 won't be available straight away until we've at least got some feedback from them. For the original poster who raised the problem in this thread (thanks Nick!) we'll be of course checking that the problem is fixed in the context it was discovered in first.
Thanks!!