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A guide to setting up a CR Rendering Node with Docker

Hi all,

I hope this is appropriate to post here - if not, mods feel free to delete.

In short though, I recently set up a CR node using Docker - and found the process a little bit challenging. So I wrote up a short guide/some things I learned on my website; maybe they will be useful for anyone else trying the same thing:

Part one is getting the Docker host ready with CUDA support:

Setting Up a Blender Rendering Node Using Docker - Part 1 :: [snowgoons.ro:~] timwa%

Part two is running CrowdRender:

Setting Up a Blender Rendering Node - Part 2 :: [snowgoons.ro:~] timwa%

I hope it helps someone!

Cheers,

Tim

11 comments

11 Comments

tim.walls

Sep 15, 2020

Thanks again for the update, I made most of the edits this morning - I'll update to 2.83 once I've done the upgrade myself this weekend (alas, the day job gets in the way) but in the meantime added a note that the newer version is available.

I should say thanks again for the image, and indeed to all the CR folks. Without this I pretty much wouldn't be able to use Blender for anything useful at all (my desktop machine is a lowly MacMini with integrated graphics) - so I really do appreciate.

zocker1600

Sep 14, 2020

this is a great read @tim.walls , here are a few of my thoughts:

1. first I apologize for the very bad timing, but I just updated all my images to Blender 2.83 LTS after I finally could fix the stupid "GPU does not get used for some unknown reason" bug

2. the switch --runtime nvidia is deprecated and - while it still works - should not be used anymore. The replacement is --gpus all

3. if you want to see the logs of the start script, you can use

docker logs -f <name of container>

the name of container is what got specified with --name

4. the missing audio device bug is very weird. To me this happened only on Ubuntu based systems, on my Debian 10 render server that doesn't happen. It is weird, because when using -noaudio it should get ignored....

5. Eeevee does produce black images, because Blender does not support Eeevee on headless systems. They need an Xserver and an attached display for some OpenGL stuff, all workarounds I have tried so far produced completely broken images (not black ones though...)

Blender devs said, that they are working on a solution, albeit with a low priority.

6. why do you pass --rm to the run command? Normally there shouldn't be a reason to create a new container on each start

7. the start script does download the addon on the first start, but once downloaded it does reuse it. So you only connect to the CR server once.

Sadly as long as the CR addon is not openSource, there is no other way for me to do that.... :(

tim.walls

Sep 16, 2020

Replying to

3 sounds good news ))).

Re, 7 - yep, as least I mean this weirdness in the control panel; when I hit Connect, I see three copies of my server (I confess to finding the 'nodes requiring IP address' a bit confusing as well, but that's by the by):

If I hit OK, then one of them will in fact connect, leaving two greyed-out 'zombies' in the machine list:

To be honest, I assumed (without much evidence) the zombies were probably there from some of my abortive attempts to get things working (it took me a few iterations of Blender versions/plugin/container etc. to get everything working - that's why I wrote the guide), and that maybe some of my 'broken' versions were still registered wherever the matchmaking happens.

Everything else with that connected/synced node works fine, though, so this is more a cosmetic than functional issue now.

James Crowther

Sep 16, 2020

Replying to

@tim.walls ok, I can see in our database that you only have one computer there that has posted. So those extra node copies will be saved to your blend file since they are properties of the scene in blender. This means you can easily get rid of them if you want to, just remove them and then save your file.

If they are showing up in your startup/default scene when opening blender, you can remove them there too by first deleting them from your scene, and then saving your startup file.

If that doesn't work, be great if you can let me know, will investigate further :)

tim.walls

Sep 21, 2020

Replying to

Ahh! D'oh; I should've figured they were saved in the render file... Good stuff, removing them then saving has stopped the zombies reappearing - my LP collection is safe.

Thanks!

tim.walls

Sep 14, 2020

Hi, thanks for the positive feedback; and many many thanks @zocker1600 for the Docker image :).

And sure, happy to offer anything I can do to help. Cheers!

James Crowther

Sep 14, 2020

Replying to

No problem Tim :) Its pretty cool to have community input like this!

James Crowther

Sep 13, 2020

Hi Tim, if this helps others, its totally appropriate and jolly good stuff!

I am not an expert in docker though, I am going to refer to our resident docker expert @zocker1600 for some comments and perhaps we can work on a resource as a collaboration. If we can make things easier for people we should and I am completely behind anyone helping out with that.

Oh, and thanks so much for posting in a positive way mate, really glad you're putting something back into the community, its really cool.

Cheers and have a great day :D

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A guide to setting up a CR Rendering Node with Docker

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