Cycles Distributed Rendering

I was wondering if this is possible with Cycles. It would be fantastic to be able to distribute single frame over the network. It makes a huge difference during the look development. Houdini has this functionality as well as vray and cinema4d.

Totally agree. Much needed, with support for GPU and CPU.

actually there are few ways to have it right now…
one is to ask guy from bitwrk.net/ to make us localohst version of plugin…
second is to use this:
https://gitlab.com/skororu/dtr I really would like to use it but changing my farm host names will destroy my workflow with other programs…
So I’m also waiting for simple plugin to send tiles :slight_smile:

Hi, search for Loki render, it is java based, platform independent and need not a complicated setup.
You can render animations or single images.

Cheers, mib

Cycles has this feature built in. Unfortunately it is not finished yet and therefore not exposed yet in official builds. I really hope for this feature too, but it hasn’t been a priority so far. See some older docs about this: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Source/Render/Cycles/Network_Render

or U can wsitch software to cinema … that’s not best advice for someone looking to distribute cycles render…

Is there any network render solution for Blender? That works, so I can render frames on several machines, no need for DR.

How about we just set this in front of @lukasstockner97 and act super pitiful xD

Deadline ! It work much better than unactivated network rendering addon from master. Deadline is free for 2 nodes

I use this feature in Modo all the time too. The funny thing in Modo is that you can actually DR render an animation too. If you already have DR setup and your networked machines are responding for single frame rendering, when you fire up a full animation render on your local machine it just start DR rendering it anyway. It’s kind of funny because it’s one of those things I don’t think the developers even thought of as a feature but it just happens to work anyway. :wink:

EDIT: I just thought I’d mention that I think farm rendering for animation is still preferable over DR because you don’t have to deal with all the overhead of sending buckets back to the local machine.

I think this is a much needed feature and a very cool one too. At least having an initial version that works only with the tiled rendering that would be great.

Please, please, please @lukasstockner97. I m actually having my pitiful puppy face while writing this.

Hoooo, that will be soooo coool to have this ! I use it all the time on Vray !

Perhaps you might evaluate CGRU, a free open source render farm manager which can run several render engines including Blender, and recently Natron, nodal compositing software, has been added too. Hope it helps.

Farm managers don’t allow us to render the same frame on multiple machines. They run jobs per frame. Therefore they are useless for speeding up the look-dev process.

I have used this multiple times but there is soo much overhead on a 1Gigabit network its doesnt speed up fast renders and its doeant really help scenes with a lot of mesh / textures because it has to send it over the network to the render machines. It is also limited to 4 GPUs unless you are freaking rich…

http://www.renegatt.com/products.php

So if you have a low poly scene that takes long to render and doesnt have textures this is good for you haha

I have been using Houdini on local network and doing interactive renders using multiple machines and it is a breeze.

Honestly I think that you would benefit with one Titan card more than with DR. Especially for look dev. For final rendering, well you might benefit from DR.

So I guess Deadline is still best solution for network rendering.

Well I have a Titan X and a GTX 970 in one machine and in another machine i have a GTX 690 (which is 2 GTX 680s) and a GTX 970 Which renders as fast and sometimes faster than the Titan X and GTX 970 lol

You can only utilize windows pc’s or certain linux setups using titan gpu, I have all mac computers on my network so I can not benefit from titan gpu’s. Not everyone can. But everyone certainly can benefit from DR.