Render Farm Managing the Queue

[boxfx]

So we have previously had a 96 Node Dual Xeon render farm for Cinema 4D.

We are looking to replace this with 10x Quadro P6000's running on the network to allow us to use Octane - I know that CUDA8 support is not in place yet, but when it is this will happen.

My question, what’s the most efficient way to use a render manager, which is best, which allows queues and changing scheduling. We do not want to tie up the local machines which artists are working on with this, we want to make sure that it can work standalone.

Has anyone done this? Does anyone have the "perfect" solution? I've looked at Renderpal - this seems reasonable (shame about the cost) but is there an alternative which we should consider?

Thank you in advance for advice.

[boxfx]

Sorry to push further we want to retain the functionality of C4D's Team Render Server whilst using Octane.

[bepeg4d]

Hi boxfx,
I guess that you can buy much more Titan X Pascal at the same price, and c4dOctane works with c4d team render, but you need a combo license for every node, look at this previous discussion:
viewtopic.php?f=30&t=54617&start=10#p290064
ciao beppe

[boxfx]

So we have been experimenting with Octane + Team Renderer - we have

1 Host
1 Slave

And it won't render - we get an error:

2016/10/19 09:57:05 DESKTOP-CI01HUS: Downloaded Asset(s) in 0.019 seconds
2016/10/19 09:57:05 DESKTOP-CI01HUS: Peer-to-Peer Statistics:
> DESKTOP-CI01HUS Download-Speed 31.48 MiB\s (1x)
Peer-to-Peer Statistics End
2016/10/19 09:57:05 DESKTOP-CI01HUS: (Error) Render-Job failed: Set render engine is not installed
2016/10/19 09:57:05 Cancelled because all attending machines failed
2016/10/19 09:57:05 Render Failed

We have the plugin in all folders.

We have C4D Installed Fully as well as the Render Client
We have Octane installed
We have the Octane Daemon installed

What are we doing moronically stupid?

[bepeg4d]

Hi boxfx,
you don't need to run the Octane daemon if you want to render in Team render mode with only two machines.
You need a combo license for all the machines, Standalone + plugin, but you don't need to install the daemon.
The daemon is used with the Octane net rendering system only.
Please try this, enable Team render with standard c4d render engine. After everything is in place and works as expected, render a simple scene in c4dOctane on both machine, just a cube to check that Octane is working correnctly. Then try with Team render with a c4dOctane scene, you should be able to work in Team render with Octane engine.
ciao beppe

[boxfx]

Okay I have done this:

- Taken off Cinema4D full
- Taken off the Daemon

I've now got Team Render Client running on it (both the client and server are running on the machine)

I have Octane installed - I also have the c4doctane in the plugins folder.

It works with a normal project for rendering

~I am still getting the error as above

[bepeg4d]

Hi boxfx,
weird
without team render, are both machines able to render the scene that gives the error message with c4dOctane with no issues?
ciao beppe

[boxfx]

The scene works fine in C4D on another machine - I can install C4D full and see if it works on this?

[boxfx]

Yep test it - works fine on the local machine.

[bepeg4d]

Hi boxfx,
the results folder is accessible from both machines?
please share some screenshots about your settings on server and client. It should be straight forward, if it works with c4d standard render, it should work also with c4dOctane in my tests
ciao beppe