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Does any one have any experience of this or advice on how to effectively split a render farm between 3 master computers so that they access the same slaves consistently without having to change settings in every C4D document they open?

That's kind of a vague question. What kind of farm management system are you using? Can you give an example of the workflow you want? You probably just need to add some basic flags to the command that kicks off every render job. Those commands will generally over-ride any of the render settings saved in the scene files themselves.

I will try to explain a bit more, I did not know quite how to word it. We will shortly have 26 GPU's spread over 7 computers, there will be three of us continuously rendering stills or animations. So three of those computers are workstations and master machines and we want to assign dedicated slaves to each of those computers on a single network. We have no management software and we do not use command line rendering. We currently have issues of computers stealing slaves mid render.

If you are asking, "Is there a way to effectively share four slaves perfectly evenly between three workstations for concurrent Live Viewer rendering?", I don't think so, unless you are willing to do the stealing back and forth thing, which is awfully inefficient. With three workstations and four slaves, one workstation will get two slave machines, but depending on what combination of GPUs and available slots you've got, you may be able to make them roughly equivalent.

You should be able to simply decide which slaves each machine will use, and pick the appropriate ones from the OctaneRender Network Preferences list of machines. To make life easier, name each Slave machine something obvious, like Render_A1, Render_A2, Render_B1, Render_B2, etc. Are your machines not honoring the selections in the Network Prefs window? Are your Network Prefs changing every time you open a new .c4d file? As far as I know, those prefs should stick on each machine, even between full shutdowns, regardless of the file you currently have open.

If you are not talking about concurrent Live Viewer rendering, then you'll get much more efficient use of your four render slaves by using some kind of render management tool, even if it's as simple as C4Ds built in Team Render. Just being able to offload a render while you continue to work on your workstation can make a huge difference in productivity.

I hope that helps.

Thank you, we will give this a try when we get our extra computers set up