C4D Net Server – Render farm – workstations – compatibility

[rschrem]

Hi rschrem,
no sorry, you have misunderstood, I was talking about the differences between Octane net render, where no assets must be shared, and Team render that needs to do that.
There is any incompatibility between c4DOctane and Team render, if you set up everything correctly everything works as expected.
If you wasn't able to make it work, most likely there was a problem of writing permission between the slaves and the server. Try with c4d standard engine first, if it works there, then it works also with c4dOctane.
As I said, Octane net rendering doesn't have this kind of issues because the master doesn't need to share any assets, reducing the headaches.
ciao beppe

Ok, I'm talking about these software products:
Maxon Team Render Server (provides a Web GUI to upload Jobs, monitor progress and download rendered results and is most likely installed on some central windows server, potentially accessible from outside of the office to monitor progress)
Maxon Team Render Client (On each render node this application runs locally, it fetches work from the Team Render Server end uploads the rendered images back to the Team Render Server)

Both softwares come for free with the Studio edition of C4D -> do not required an additional C4D license for each render node.
Also many plugins come with free support for the team Render Client -> again I do not need additional licenses for each render node.

My results:
When I upload a C4D job with textures that does NOT use Octane to the Team Render Server the texture files get distributed to all Team Render Clients just fine.

BUT:
The Team Render Server will NOT distribute any textures used in Octane Materials - I guess the Team Render Server does not understand Octane Materials sufficiently to find out what files needs to be distributed the the Team Render Clients. Would be great if this could fixed as this means that the Team Render Server product is not compatible with octane1

A temporary work around is to copy all required texture files manually to a central file server and adding the path to this file server folder to all Team Render Client as a additional texture search path. This works, but as this is a manual process step this is error prone. An of course this will not work when you want to upload jobs to the Team Render Server using the Web GUI alone.

[bepeg4d]

Hi rschrem,
I see, the server is not able to transfer texture assets even from server to client in the same machine, and you have to manually copy them
And the log doesn't say anything about the issue, very bad.
Do you know if the same issue happens also with other external render engine?
As said before, in my opinion, this is the old way to do network rendering, since all assets and plugin needs to be transfered in all the machines involved, a lot more errors and issues are possible, and personally I don't ever want to go back to this.
OctaneRender network rendering never have this issues and I can use it wherever and whenever I want via Teamviewer, even via iPad.
ciao beppe

[rschrem]

As said before, in my opinion, this is the old way to do network rendering, since all assets and plugin needs to be transfered in all the machines involved, a lot more errors and issues are possible, and personally I don't ever want to go back to this.

Hm, I think in any multi user setup you would want to have some central instance to coordinate various render tasks.

In your setup - which works fine if you work all alone - i assume we would need a extra computer with a fully licensed C4D Studio setup only to execute batch render jobs, right? And anyone who wants to queue something for rendering would need to have access to this computer, right?

We have 6+ C4D workstations and a render farm consisting of 3 Servers, each with 7x Titan X.
How would you use Octane Net Render to share the computing capabilities of this render farm among all 6 C4D operators?
How can they run background render tasks (that might run many hours, days) in a controlled way?

[bepeg4d]

Hi rschrem,
since I love to do my final work in Standalone, I prefer to use Standalone with Lua scripts for complex and long batch rendering sessions, but probably I'm the only one, so it doesn't count
Anyway, on a second try, it seems that, changing the default paths from the hidden write protected nonsense directory, and moving all of them on an external hd viewable on all the network, completely solves the issue:

The tex folder is not created in all the clients folders, but seems not to be necessary.
ciao beppe

[preciousillusion]

Have you tried unchecking "clients get assets on demand" and/or "peer to peer asset distribution" in Team Render Server? It has solved similar problems with other plugins for me.