Hi Fredrik, many apologies for missing thins post. Ok, so the addition of CR to your firewall depends on the platform. For windows the rule should be added to allow the Blender executable to listen on all TCP ports. You can restrict this to just ports 9669 to 9694 if you'd rather narrow this down a bit. Note that if you decide to use a different port range in Crowdrender's settings, you'll have to remind yourself to also change the port range for the firewall settings as well. You may also be running a firewall on your Mac. The same applies to windows, you need to allow Blender to receive incoming connections on the default ports of 9669 - 9694 (unless you have configured the addon to use a different port range). Hope this helps!

Hi Fredrik :) Viewport shading will work, but you need to have cycles set as your render engine. You can switch back to Crowdrender at any time and do a quick render though. Just be sure to do a resync before you do to update all your render nodes with any changes you might make to shaders/materials. Deferred viewport rendering sound super cool, we'll look into it, sounds like its going to involve forking Blender though as we've looked at this before and can't see a way to do this in our addon without making changes to Blender's C/C++ code as well.

Yeah, that sounds odd, resyncing normally solves missing asset issues after you pack everything. In some cases it won't, video textures don't pack, also anything you have linked from another blend file isn't actually packed. Having said that though, none of that explains why it started working!!

Thanks @ginanjar primayoga ! Great to know that, when you say, external file, are you referring to any external files, or particular ones like textures, HDRIs, simulation cache?

Hi @PhoenixBLADE, apologies for the delayed response. Are you able to download the latest version of the addon? If not then we need to fix your subscription asap, you can mail us directly at info at crowdrender dot com dot au, though I will find your ticket and try to respond to you directly, if that doesn't happen, please email us straight away. Pink textures happen when you use textures, but don't pack them into your blend file. Crowdrender doesn't automatically handle external files for you. You have a choice of how to handle using external files. You can either pack them, or host them in a shared location on your network. Packing is fairly easy since Blender has a menu function for doing this, you just got to Blender's File menu > external data and then choose pack into blend. Then you have resynchronise your render nodes. There's a button for this on the Crowdrender panel, which is located in Blender's Render Properties window. We've made a couple of videos about hosting external files from a shared folder, this takes a lot more setup, but once it is setup, its far more flexible and convenient than having to pack files every time you add a new texture or HDRI. Here's a link -> https://youtu.be/TOUSCaduE1s Sorry for the late response. Sometimes it does take time for me to get around to everyone. There are also two account systems on our website, sorry for the confusion here. We have a forum hosted by Wix which has a separate login system to our discovery.crowd-render.com/download area.

Hi Christoph :), just sent you a reply to your email about this same issue. I think it might help if you try to resync your render node. The output you've provided above suggests that there are missing objects in the copy of the scene on the render node. A resync will take a new snapshot of your scene from the client/master and send it to the render node, updating it with the latest data from your scene. I think this will help with the warnings about the missing objects, hopefully it synchronises, if not, please come back and we'll look deeper.

Hi @walkerzavareei and @Colin Wolff, both of these issues were caused because due to the version of python that Blender 3.1 and 3.2 now use. Blender decided to upgrade to bundle python v3.10. This meant that our addon was no longer compatible since until the release of V0.4.3, our addon was bundled with binaries to support up to python 3.9. V0.4.3 fixed this and is fully compatible with python 3.10 and has been tested to work with Blender 3.1 stable, and Blender 3.2 alpha.

Hi Fredrik ;) thanks for posting, in short, we're likely going to replace tiled rendering with two different modes. For animation rendering, we're going to use frame splitting where there is one frame worked on by each node. This will likely be more efficient since each node will be working independently and will immediately go to the next tile when it is finished For single frame rendering we're experimenting with sample splitting. Cycles had this feature for a while and then we helped patch Blender to bring the same feature to cycles x as it was about to be dropped by the blender developers. Sample splitting allows a similar mechanism to frame splitting in that all the machines are independent of each other and work on different samples of the entire range of samples you request. As for faster feedback, sample splitting offers the best way for this to happen since we can effectively return an image with just a few samples to begin with and then build on that. As for when to expect this, probably the second half of the year. Hope this helps :) James

Hi @alexandrupopoviciioan not at the moment, we'll let you know if that changes though :)

Hi Andreas, sorry for not getting to your question sooner :( Ok, so as for starting a headless server so you can render on those nodes, you can certainly do that. The general form of the command will be: blender -b -noaudio -P ~/.config/blender/3.0/scripts/addons/crowdrender/cr_source/core/serv_int_start.py -- -t server_int_proc Explanation the first part starts Blender in background mode with no audio (on linux not specifying noaudio can cause errors). the -P option tells Blender to load a script from the provided argument to this option. that script is what starts the headless server. The script needs an option though. So we use -- to tell Blender to pass all the following options and arguments to python (otherwise blender will try to interpret them as its own and error). -t tells the script the type of background service you want to run, which will be server_int_proc, or the headless server. This should be enough for you to run a headless server. Turning this into a service on linux might be possible too if you research a little bit. Also I've provided the contents of a recent bat script for windows. If you put this bat file in your user's startup directory, then each time the machine starts, it will start a headless server at logon time. "%AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Blender\blender.lnk" -b -noaudio --factory-startup -P "%AppData%\Blender Foundation\Blender\3.0\scripts\addons\crowdrender\cr_source\core\serv_int_start.py" -- -t "server_int_proc" This script assumes that the location of Blender is such that there is a shortcut to the executable in the start menu. This is the default for installing Blender with the .msi download from Blender.org. It also assumes you installed Blender 3.0. You can change both of these though to suit your needs. The script is not licensed so you can do with it whatever you like. Hope this helps and good luck!

Hi Rasmus, are you aware of the load balancer menu in the Crowdrender panel? I would suggest setting load balancing to manual and then set the amount of the screen rendered by each machine to be 0.5 each. The logic of this is that if you have two machines of equal power, then they should render half or 0.5 of the total area each. I suspect what may have happened here is that you have used automatic mode. Auto mode has a few quirks, one of which is that if you render on just one of the computers initially, then connect a second computer and render with the second computer enabled. The load balancer, for the first frame, will not give much of the screen to the second machine. This results in a slower render than normal. Using manual mode you can get around this. One other potential cause is that by default, the CPU and GPU will render. Since CPUs grab a lot of tiles, if you set large tile sizes, then what can happen is that the CPU will grab a lot of tiles and effectively you'll be CPU rendering MOST of the image. So, try going into the settings for each of your nodes, and making sure that you're not using the CPU and the GPU at the same time without realising it. Chances are, you will be. Try these tips out and please write back if they help?

Ok, no problem, send us an e-mail to our info at crowdrender dot com dot au address with your account details (username is all we need) and I'll be able to help. This forum uses a different account system so its not actually connected in anyway which makes it tricky matching your forum account to the discovery.crowd-render.com account where you download stuff.

Hi there :) Ok, first, welcome to the forum, and thanks for posting. The problem with nodes coming back is probably because they are logged into your cloud account. They will persist in your account, but I can remove them if you like. Just remember, if you login to your cloud account from the addon. The computer you do that from will be visible to any of your other computers that are also logged in, even if it's off. As for the image error, yes this is our bug, its already been fixed in V0.4.1 -> https://youtu.be/1FGK-ZqhwSE V0.4.1 is accessible if you are subscribed to the Crowdrender development fund. Looks to me like you're using the current free version, V0.3.1? Hope this helps!

Please reach out for support if you need us :) I'd like to make sure you can render it with Crowdrender for sure!

@Jacob That's great to hear!

Hi, wow that is really cool! I liked being able to look around, really nice, was the panorama used in that link rendered with crowdrender? I'd like to ask if I could share that link around on social media and let people know you made it with Crowdrender if that's ok? I'll make sure to credit you as the author, let me know if that's ok and if you want anything specific mentioning in posts I do?

Hi @aaronksen just checking if my answer helped at all?

You're welcome!

Hi Jacob, yeah, that was me :) I help out with the gist and moderate this forum too. Just curious did this work?

No problem :) would you be able to post a final render of this working? That would be fantastic!