Support Crowdrender!

Hi James, Very nice to see that you tried the big mess by yourself hhh. Exact ive had the same results. Ive noticed that there was two background processes, that why i said that CR try to mimic a rendering engine by itself. The permanent data option is on the latest releases of E-cycles, its like the option that blender had on 2.79, where there no more processing between two frames, and keep all the data already precalculated needed for the next rendering. Well, all the users of E-cycles noticed that when using it, their render time has droped at a minimum of 50% of time without using any E-cycles rendering preset, and if there is any used preset u can see your rendering time drops to 80% to 90% depending on the scene etc ... In a wonderful world, i would suggest this setup : 1. X number of machines use the same E-cycles build like (2.83.8 for example) and each machine use the version optimised for its GPU hardware (E-cycles RTX or E-cycles CUDA) 2. The Master machine use one of the E-cycles presets, or the user settings and also Persistent Data option when needed 3. CR will transfer all the data needed between the machines with an exact copy of the rendering settings too. 4. CR will manage the rendering balance between the machines and better, it could send a signal to the machines that just finished the job to start calculating other frames when the part of their job has finished 5. CR will have an option in the Master to check, if we want all the machines process always the same frame at the same time, or use a balance system, to make the machines renders different frames or join other started frames to help on rendering. 6. CR will get an option to choose which machine at the end of rendering will start denoising all the frames at once. And can use the temporal animation denoiser (as experiment) (type bpy cycles animation denoiser to see what im talking about) Voilà ! My thaughts about all this mess lol... i think that E-cycles and CR are the futur of blender if they combine their optimised scripts together. Now what i do, is that I open the same scene in different machines with E-cycles and start rendering animation with placeholder option. But if CR could add the option to make the machines search for rendering jobs to help the others and manage all the distributed rendering system from the Master machine etc... That would be the dream solution. ----- About the scene, im very sorry mate, i cant share it, its confidential, a project for the government. Im waiting for you thaughts too Cheers

Hi, thx for the support ! Well im going to give you a lot of details concerning my setup. Client : Running "E-cycles 2.83.3 RTX", on a RTX 2080 machine with CR 0.2.8 Slave : Running "E-cycles 2.83.8 Cuda", on a GTX 1080TI machine with CR 0.2.8 The Master Scene : Composed of linked scenes and linked assets from Plugins like Botaniq and some appended assets (materials and objects), and some Scattered vegetation from Scatter addon plugin. On my settings all my paths are absolute, not relatives. The Linked Scenes : Use some linked materials. Well after some researches yesterday, i opened each linked scene and i packed libraries and packed external files. Then opened the Master scene and did the same thing. Then my two computers started to sync correctly (no more sync fail) Settings : Master : Optix and no CPU Slave : Cuda and no CPU And specifying 256 tiling size for the two (cause i dont know if I just let it 0, if CR will do this setting automatically) Hitting render : - The Slave start rendering, and finish the job - The Master start rendering but stay at 0%... ------- I supposed maybe that the Master Blender Ecycles RTX Build wasnt supported by CR for some reason. I opened a new Blender in Master that is the same exact build as slave (E-cycles 2.83.8 Cuda)... So my two machines rendered the scenes and finished their jobs. So I managed to make CR works on my two computers. Good ! :) Lets talk about my thaughts, my expectations and the results. I come from 20 years of 3dsmax and then maybe 10 years of vray dont remember exactly when vray started, but ive started using it since the first versions. I always used 3dsmax backburner and the distributed rendering functions of vray. The idea is to have the more quicker results. I discovered Blender and bring it to my pipeline, and finally i put Blender as my first choice for rendering and for everything else and use maybe 3dsmax at only 0.001% only maybe to transfer some assets to blender. After 2 or 3 months of using Blender i discovered E-cycles builds, that are extremely speeding renderings, and now with the latests build there is "Permanent Data" option, so the frames start to render directly after a frame is finished, everything is precalculated by the first frame, and that also speedup rendering. For me using CR will use my own Blender rendering settings, so here it's E-cycles optimised builds in each machine and will add distributed rendering function only, in this case i will use all the power of my all machines and all the extra functions of the rendering optimisations, and CR job would manage two things, number of tiles that each machine will render (balance existing function in CR) and stitching the generated tiles from each machine. But the CR idea is different i guess, so CR finally try to mimic a rendering engine by itself, by taking into account the most important settings known in Blender and make a rendering using the distributed rendering function. The results : Using E-cycles only for this scene : Master : 20 sec per frame Slave : 38 sec per frame And no extra time in precalculating the scene for each frame after the first rendered frame in each machine cause of "Permanent Data option" So in 58 sec i have 2 finished frames Using E-cycles + CR : Master : for 50% of one frame 2 min Slave : for 50% of one frame 2min 40 sec Plus extra time for taking the part from the slave and saving the file. So at the end each frame is finished completely at nearby 5min. -------- Im saying that, so you can try to see if there any new strategy you can develop. Maybe cooperation with Mathieu, who is making Ecycles. I dont know. But im going to Continue testing CR. I wish you all luck and will stay tuned for all the upcoming releases.