Octane Cinema 4D Network Rendering Large Res

[glasshandfilms]

How's it going guys?

Currently we have a client that needs an extremely large animation for a video wall. We're talking 8960x2160 for a 2 minute looping animation.

We are using the latest version of r16 and the latest versions of Octane Standalone.

The farm and workstation all have NVIDIA GTX GeForce 980 TI's, the workstation has 3, and then we have 3 clients with 3 GPUs as well.

Using pathtracing, the animation will render for about 15 frames until one of the clients heartbeat gets messed up and brings the whole process to a halt.

I've seen prior posts concerning this issue with abnormally large (resolution) images and using HDRs here with using a beta build: http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 59#p219359

That issue was said to be fixed.

We have switched to using directlighting and using just a rgb spectrum for the environment now and are further testing this method.

Is there anything that you guys can think of to get this animation to not screech to a halt? Thanks a ton!

[glasshandfilms]

Oh and one more thing I left out, we are not using the picture viewer, instead we are using the render queue, based on reports that the picture viewer could be stopping the animation rendering process.

[glasshandfilms]

So another update....

We have went to directlighting, no hdr, and still we can't move below a resolution of 8960x2160 because of client needs.

I went back to using the picture viewer and I am able to get 30+ frames to render using that method.

Right now, pretty lost on how these variables are coming together. hahaha

[aoktar]

So another update....

We have went to directlighting, no hdr, and still we can't move below a resolution of 8960x2160 because of client needs.

I went back to using the picture viewer and I am able to get 30+ frames to render using that method.

Right now, pretty lost on how these variables are coming together. hahaha

If you give more info we can have more idea about posibilities. How much vram is using by your scene? Resolution which you say that will not consume more than 300mb. Do you have also render passes? Can you render scene on single pc without network?

[glasshandfilms]

Hey aoktar!

I've attached an image to show the stats at the bottom of the picture viewer. I am not using render passes anymore because of the extra time added per frame and it seemed to eat up a lot of resources. I haven't let this go an extended period of time on one machine, just because the extra boost is nice but I agree that this should be tested on one machine to see how it performs.

[aoktar]

Hey aoktar!

I've attached an image to show the stats at the bottom of the picture viewer. I am not using render passes anymore because of the extra time added per frame and it seemed to eat up a lot of resources. I haven't let this go an extended period of time on one machine, just because the extra boost is nice but I agree that this should be tested on one machine to see how it performs.

Scene seems that spends low resources. It's ok. I think there should be another problem on clients. Have you tried to use this farm setup for some different scenes? Can you confirm your setup's stability?

[glasshandfilms]

Thank you for the reply!

I cannot confirm my farm's stability. That's a great question, considering I had just built those 3 PC's a week or so ago. haha

I know this is a super vague question, but in your experience, has their been anything that can bring the clients to stop rendering animations?

I feel like the solution could be right under my nose, but my lack of experience (with render farms and new to octane) is causing me to speculate and not draw reasonable solutions to fix the problem.

Any bit of advice is appreciated greatly!

[bepeg4d]

hi,
I noticed from your screenshot that you are losing some VRam in the master.
Are you using one GPU for both monitor and Octane without the priority option?
Have you disabled the "multi GPU" option in the nvidia control panel?
Are the slaves setting up in the same way?
ciao beppe

[glasshandfilms]

Hi bepeg4d!

Thank you for the post!

Yes I feel like VRam could be the culprit here. Sometimes it will render for 100 frames and then render for like 10 frames and freeze.

On the master I am using all three GPU's for rendering. (All 3 980 TI's) The priority is not set, meaning I am using everything the master can give.

I haven't checked out the NVIDIA control panel for the multi GPU setting. I do have SLI disabled for all machines involved.

The slaves have identical hardware. Each same motherboard, RAM, GPU's, CPU, etc.

Thank you!!

[aoktar]

Hi bepeg4d!

Thank you for the post!

Yes I feel like VRam could be the culprit here. Sometimes it will render for 100 frames and then render for like 10 frames and freeze.

On the master I am using all three GPU's for rendering. (All 3 980 TI's) The priority is not set, meaning I am using everything the master can give.

I haven't checked out the NVIDIA control panel for the multi GPU setting. I do have SLI disabled for all machines involved.

The slaves have identical hardware. Each same motherboard, RAM, GPU's, CPU, etc.

Thank you!!

Which is freezing? Clients or master? What kind of freeze? What happens when you use some of clients? Have you tried some other scenes to test your farm?