If I understand correctly, Flamenco has the ability to load all linked libraries in all the slave machines recursively and without the need to pack your blend file or alter it in any way, which I find simply amazing (though I haven't tried it yet). Do you plan to implement such a feature as well? To give you some context, in my daily job (as well as most if not all movie-making pipelines), packing a file at render time is not an option because it would break the asset editing process. Being able to edit linked assets, materials and lights after rendering is crucial, since rendering is precisely the only way to tell what should be edited (at least for materials and lighting). If I pack a file, render an image and then perform some changes on the assets, these changes won't propagate in other files of a larger project as they should, since nothing is linked anymore.
Ricardo Roçadas
2 hours ago
Discussion
One of the best things the other distributed renders have is that they just need to be working on a same network drive to know all information for that render frame/animation. I have worked for several years with backburner on a office because they use 3ds Max with vray distributed render and was very very simple to work, we just need to map the network drive and folders on all nodes, set the startup of backburner on each node and turn on all nodes. Then open the file and start a new job as needed to send the render to all nodes. We just didn´t whait for syncing or have any issues of delay. After that i found my own studio and because of the cost of maintaining Max licences we have choosen the blender for our render software in 2012. When we started we start with network render of blender and then we have instaled Loki Render and used until now. Loki just need to now were is the exe file of blender "blender.exe" on each node and use the direct power of each node cpu/gpu just like we left the file saved. It reduces the time almost be divinding the time per each node so if 1 pc the rener time is 1 hour with to is more or less 35/40 minutes. My sugestion for crowdrender is to try working just with one network drive were the file is edited and mark on each node that same network drive, if needed inside the addon we can choose were we have the texstures so each time we click on render, crowdrender will scan for each texture used on the file and pick up on that folder to distribute that information for all nodes. Don´t now if this make sense but it seems to me that crowdrender have been strugling with sync problems.
Hi there! Well the truth is we are looking at how best to solve this. Solutions like flamenco are interesting, they tend to be aimed at studios that have large projects to work on. I have heard from many people that F is hard to setup and requires a lot of know how.
Our add-on is meant to be drop dead simple to get running. So it has not adopted this very hands on approach for syncing assets.
Packing is not really what we want to have artists do though, we've talked with other artists and we've gotten mixed responses. Some have told us that they use a NAS/shared folder setup where each node has access to the shared location. In this setup, there's no need to relocate assets since, at render time, all the assets are referred from the NAS/shared folder.
If you can afford to have a dedicated machine or NAS, then in my opinion, this is the most flexible and easiest to debug option. It is not the fastest however, and depends on your network infrastructure as to how much it will lag behind having all the files local on each hard drive.
There are a lot of things we have to weigh up when considering the solution we will roll out. Lots of studios use NAS systems so they don't need this, smaller studios will require something to help with this problem, but then they're not likely to use Flamenco as it requires a tech person on site to setup (again that's me repeating hearsay, I don't know if its still true).
We have not yet decided how we'll deal with this. Though we're leaning towards actively managing the files as flamenco does. We're going to be releasing a full beta next year and part of that will be having the ability to sync computers at remote locations to your master. This obviously requires assets to be relocated and so there's no way out of that, unless studios and other users already have a VPN setup so that the remote sites are part of the VPN.
That said the approach in that case of having a VPN, requires that all computers now run the VPN client and there is a VPN server, so there is more cost with this option and more complexity, now you need your tech expert on site to be able to configure and manage the VPN and the NAS!
We're aiming to build into CR the ability to do this, but we're still designing it because we don't want to mess with the current studio practice of NAS usage. That requires some clever design on our part as we don't want a learning curve with Crowdrender for existing setups, we should be able to just drop in and go.
Hope that helps :)
James