@James Sorry for the abundant replies here -- just discovered the reason it could not connect between the two laptops has something to do with me using the ethernet cable -- I don't have a router handy at my location so I was directly connecting the two laptops via ethernet connection without a router. I can connect to the node on the slave laptop if I just use my hotspot wifi on my cell phone to network the laptops and disconnect the ethernet cable. Aside from that -- I have disconnected the HDRI node for the background and stopped using it for lighting and just used a sun lamp. But it still does not render correctly from the slave computer. And you are correct -- from version 2.80.40 and up it will not work correctly with the slave computer. I can connect the computers but I get no response from the slave computer "unless" I am using 2.80.39 on both machines. Hope you have a solution soon for this :) I am also very interested in using your add-on with the render cloud you have available as my slave computer is slower than my main and it's practically useless for me to use the slave because it slows down the render process. Unless I am doing something wrong in the setup that I don't see here with your add-on? Have you considered to offer an option in your node setup to use file placeholders like shown in this setup for local render farms to process animations? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3EcpkwLCFI Would this help those like me who at this time have a slower slave computer to process animations? Or am I still missing something with the idea of your setup? Thanks for the patience and help. This is new stuff to me. Gary

@James Thanks for extra efforts to help :) Now I can't connect my two windows laptops via your plugin. Have no clue what happened. Maybe it's the bug you mentioned for 2.80.4? Hope you have an update coming out soon -- will I be notified via email when it arrives?

@James -- I used the basic principal shaders.

@James Thanks! Mine is 2.80.41 -- it's working still. Just really slow with the other laptop and why the purple shading?

Also -- just to compare -- the main Laptop I am using right now rendered the whole frame by itself in 54 seconds. So using your node system slowed it down at least 30 seconds. Suggestions? Thank you for helping me understand all this -- your product looks great. Perhaps I should just consider the cloud nodes?

I got great news that the computers are now syncing in Blender -- thanks to this video on YouTube -- discovered Windows 10 had disabled key features that was blocking your add-on from communicating to the other Windows laptop. So if anyone has this problem with Windows machines they may want to look into this solution! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bIcJluf-0Q However, the render did not turn out well. My main Laptop PC render looks fine --- but the synced PC laptop render had purple instead. Do I need the same file opened on the synced PC's? Or just need to have Blender open and node started? Why is it purple and not colored correctly as my test scene should have? It's an older ASUS laptop with 16gb of ram and i-7 processor. It's slow....but hoping can make it work a little faster. By the way, can you give me a estimated cost at rendering a scene on the cloud? I don't know what .02c/GHZ means and how that calculates to rendering? Blendergrid.com gives an example costs -- are your costs much lower than theirs? Thanks for helping and sorry if I threw a few questions in not pertaining to bugs. :)

Thanks James for the fast reply! Where do I find out what version of Blender 2.8 I have? This screenshot is what my splashscreen shows of Blender. I have other versions of 2.8 builds of blender from back in Decemeber. Perhaps that is before 2.80.40? And thank you for fixing the bug. Hopefully you hear back from Blender developers soon. - Gary