@James ok, will send the current project. Actually I am going to try a fresh install on all computers and see .

Moved all cards to one computer to simplify , still the render does not show up , stuck on 100% render. Any idea why the render does not show up ? Chasing this is exhausting, opened another project and now it gets the rendered tile. Open a new project , defautl cube ,resync and it does not get the tile. No rhyme or reason to any of this. Where Can I find logs to send you guys ?

After reopening. Blender 1 Looks like its connected but will not sync, the other ones are just greyed out. Connect or resync does nothing. So far, even though all of this appears random behaviour to me , this might be the most consistant fault. Not showing the renders , or something not working and any attempt to fix it by saving , resyncing , reopening will result in it losing connection and after that , nothing I can do to get it connected again. I did close Blender , found two Blender processes in the task manager , killed them , reopened, same thing as you see in the image. Is this only happening on my side ? Does this work for you guys when using multiple computers or do any of these problems look familiar to you ? It would be so awesome to have this work , I now have 5 computers, 4 of them just sitting there.

Render finished , node renders do not show up. Question, is it normal that it saves as exr ? And is that path shown possibly the problem ? Also , as you can see, it still says "rendering" and keeps showing that until I hit cancel render, even though all rendering is finished.

Rendering , seems fine.

Been trying to use this , still with all kinds of seemingly random sync problems , but now I seem to have a persistent problem . When I get it to sync and everything looks like its going to work , none of the nodes show their render when done , only the master shows its render. Anything particular that comes to mind ?

Still doing some tests, hoping to find something common to the faults I am having, will post.

@James Sure, I am more then willing to help if I can . My animation is huge but I will make an example project and send .

ok, tried my main project , an animation, basically the reason I am doing all this , Opened project , all nodes show up, upload project , works. Rendering, works ..I am super happy ...until the image is finished...no image, lol. I think I am going to have to give up on this for now. I have spent a few days on this and its just not working. Shame really as I cannot find anything else that will do this , eagerly awaiting the update.

Apart from any syncing, just to get it to connect is a big problem. Sometimes only one connects , sometimes none, its pretty random. Having said that , start a new project , node computers shut off. Make a simple project, default cube Turn on computers , they appear in the list , try connect , nothing happens. I tried removing and re-adding Blender 1 , not sure what is the difference between showing the camera and settings for the other 2. Tried shutting down , searching task manager for tasks, none found. Reopen , same thing. Now I open a new project and this is how it opens . Only one node seen. I Hit conn and it hooks up, works to render. Adding another node. Failed to connect. I try resync , and it just sits like this. Try again, new project . Node 1 Works. add more and it goes random. And this is just with the default cube. In my case I cannot get it to work reliably at all and its just so random that I cannot pin it down. I would be happy with just at certain points, enable the nodes ,hit render. But , no such luck Then I open up the bmw that I have been testing and it works with all nodes, no idea why ? Not sure what to try ? Should I try to remove blender and do a reinstall or something ?

@James I see, maybe there is a user experience "issue" as it were, or me expecting it to work differently. You kind of expect when starting a project that CR will just sit there until needed, in that when you then need to render , you save , with packing,hit sync and you can start rendering. In terms of workflow , for me , I am using the render way before I am planning to do a final render to test issues , materials etc , so I imagined CR would be standby to render when I need throughout the project as long as the save, pack, resync procedure is followed. Am I right that there are 2 types of sync ? The one you talk about where it automatically syncs limited edits and tweaks and then the resync function that would sync everything ? I expect the resync to load the project as is to the nodes as long as its saved and I am good to go ? The auto sync being more applicable when working on minor tweaks for the final render. And the manual resync would be more applicable when just doing test renders in a project in progress. Am I incorrect ? Is your approach that the addon is mostly for final tweaks and not for intermediate renders? ps. I can see a start button when I open Blender , but its there just for a second and then CR is engaged. Maybe the start button could engage the addon when needed ? So I can have all nodes setup and just sitting there waiting to be engaged. pps. I have tried shutting down Blender and I never see anything in the task manager to shutdown? Would these tasks be marked as a Blender task or something else ? Again, LOVE it when it works and looking forward to the next version. Rendered the BMW in just under a minute last night which is pretty amazing.

I dont know if this tells you anything, but I was testing with an plane and a box, add materials , resync , works. Then I added a sphere , resync, resync failed and now its dead , nodes dont respond to anything. Saving, reverting ,reopening does nothing . If I reopen the project its the same , dead. Must be something wrong with the project itself at the node side. And I am going to sleep.

In conclusion from testing pretty much all day , when it works , its awesome ! some of the time its flawless, change something ,hit resync , bam , all good ! Most of the time it does not work...Why ? I dont know , it seems quite random. Sometimes there is just no activity on the nodes , connecting , resyncing either does nothing or fails, saving , reverting does nothing. Sometimes it even says render and nothing happens and it goes back to saying sync. Basically I have had all possible versions of not working. Having said that , node 3 now works ...I fully expect it to stop working :) Weirdly , sometimes, reopening the project does not help , its pretty much dead in the water and i need to use another save and try again. I dont know if I can be of any assistance , send a log or something , I would love to have this work properly. Or do you have any ideas to narrow down the problems I am having ?

@James Indeed :)

Suggestion , its strange to set the manual load when it autocalculates the other values , especially when you are working with multiple nodes , you have to lower one value to raise the other and then maybe it raises the third, bit of a mess. Maybe it should allow one to set the values and then auto calculate numbers if they are off when you hit ok.

I see, that worked. Only working with a simple cube , rendering on 1080ti is 57 sec. Rendering on the main and 2 nodes x*970 and a 980ti gives me 22 sec. Now to see if any regular projects work . ;)

Remove one node as its not working... save , reopen , now I am back to Main computer on CPu and a fourth of the image not rendering. Can it not know that one of the nodes has been removed ?

I got it to render ..on two nodes , 3rd node is stuck at rendering 0% and main computer insists on rendering on CPU . 3rd computer is probably also rendering on CPU , cant operate it at the moment. EDIT: yes , nr 3 is rendering on CPU. Stopped the render , now node 1 -2 are ready and 3 is synced , not sure about the difference? Is there a procedure I should follow to make this more likely to work , like always saving and resyncing before trying to render ? Most of my resyncs fail so I have hesitated to use that . Also, any thoughts on why some nodes seem to refuse Cuda render ? EDIT: I got the main computer to render on CUDA by going into preferences , disabling CUDA, reanabling and doing the same for CRowdrender main computer. 3rd computer does not want to play ball. Not sure if it means anything but nr 3 says synced, while the other ones say Ready. So , its Semi working at the moment, god knows what happens if I open another project , seems very hit and miss :) As it stands , two main problems . 1. 3rd computer will not start CUDA render. 2 . Main computer will not CUDA until I disable/enable. PS...the speed is insane!

Same here , sync failed , cannot connect , etc etc . I have 4 computers and at this point its impossible to get this to work.

So far it seems impossible to make this work for me . At some point one computer got sync but that is a far as I could take this , most of the time its either unsynced or cannot connect. Just now I got it to sync , tried rendering , image was obviously not synced , tried resync... Sync failed.