Just an additional thought. It might be useful if CrowdRender did some of this ahead of time auto-magically. So, at the launch of a render you get a prompt that gives you the options: Save your work then quietly CrowdRender: Packs the .blend File Packs the libraries Packs whatever else blender needs to use And, not visible to the user, the fully packed up blend file gets stored either in the project folder or a temp folder and that is what gets distributed to the other machines. There's a similar methodology when rendering in V-Ray where the renderer packs a .vrscene and that's what would get distributed to the other nodes. Depending on the network I imagine this could take more time, but really, stability is the name of the game in this instance. I don't know. Just thinking out loud and I'm sure a lot of this has already been thought about...

It does make sense. I tried what I thought was the pack method you explained above by using File> External Data> Pack All Into .blend but it sounds like that's different than Pack Libraries. A lot of this is my own inexperience in Blender so I'm sorry if these are sort of basic level questions at the moment. Ill try the Pack libraries function next and see where that leads. As far as pathing goes, I have an unraid server on the network that has all my project folders and asset resources in a few different directories. Each machine has access to those network directories via a mounted collection of drives on each machine, so there shouldn't be any issues with no being able to access the directories. That said I wonder if the mounted directories are all correct (A: Drive, B: Drive etc.) If one of the drive mounts was done incorrectly and a drive was mounted with a different drive letter than my machine, I assume that might effect the pathing for CrowdRender (sorry here too, my networking skills are limited as well)? In any case, you've given me some food for thought and Ill do some additional testing! Thanks!

That should work. And yeah. I had it flipped in my head for some reason. But Thursday, your 8:30am my 6:30 pm

Thursday at the same time should work. So, your Thursday evening is my Wednesday morning (just trying to make sure. But either way, that will work!

Hey James. I said yes to the invite but I was just invited to speak at a local conference on Tuesday so it’s going to be a little tougher to do a call. If it makes more sense we can push another day? Otherwise I can remote into all of my machines from the conference floor?

@James Ummmm, Monday my time, I guess, that would mean Tuesday your time. Ugh, timezones make my brain hurt sometimes. Lets do Tuesday your time 8:30am (6:30pm EST)

@James no I don’t think I’ll be able to hop on that lat unfortunately. Would your have some availablity on monday?

@James that sounds great! I suppose we could do like 8:30am your time? That’s about 6:30pm here. Would that work?

Hi James, I seem to be having a similar problem, however I'm in an all windows environment. I have all my nodes set up but I'm not getting anything but my local machine rendering. I cant seem to get the Log file to upload here, but Ill try again, or should I just email them to you? In any case, I'd be open to a video call when ever you might be free :)

Thats great. does blender need to be running on a machine that is intended for use as a node?