Hey there, Crowdrender is an addon I am working on with another four devs now. Its been released since early 2016, the last release, 0.1.2 was published December last year. We’re working on the next version, 0.1.3, and I am curious to know what features artists want to see in a distributed rendering addon. We’ve got lots of ideas ourselves, but in the end, I think what makes a great tool is artist input.
So, what do you think the most important features are?
Or you can download it and try it your self (its free software, but we’re requiring registration right now as we’re still in the alpha stage and we’d like to get feedback from you if you use it), here’s the link -> https://www.crowd-render.com/download
C&C most welcome, come to think of it thats the entire thrust of this post anywa :S
Hi, i just discovered this addon and to me its already pretty simple and useful.
My ideas are:
Have a username/pin to connect the machines, have the functionality rely just on ip adresses is very frustrating. Country, network type, data plan… various things can make this method dont work as intended.
Create some sort of ‘machine pool’ option. Upon enabling, my machine would be open to render requests by other users. Rewarding the user that render often.
Part of previous idea. Offer a farm option provided by yourselves. Making it easy to buy credits or earn them by rendering a lot to other users…
Thats it, if any other idea come up i post here again.
Hope it helps. Keep up the awesome work
Hi Heat :), thanks for posting, always great to meet new folk on ba. I’m so glad the addon is useful for you already and like your suggestions. Just wondering what version you’re using? We’ve made some improvements since this original post, we’re up to version 0.1.5 and will soon release 0.1.6.
In response to your ideas;
You can connect to another computer using the host name, just wondering if this would make it betters, you’re right that ip addresses are frustrating and can change forcing you to update them in the addon. But I’ve been using the host name of the computer as the node’s name in the addon, when pressing connect, the addon will try to resolve the host name to its ip address and connect, much more convenient.
I like the idea of username and pin, but would like to know if you think that is better than using the host name?
That is where our beta crowdfunding campaign was going to take us. But it seems there wasn’t enough interest in making this. We didn’t meet our target, but we’re still raising funds through donation on our website to build the beta version and we do want to include this feature.
Ok, we’re not officially advertising this, because we’re testing and refining it with friendlies first. We’ve built integration with Blender Grid. You can now add extra render nodes that are powerful servers from the Blender Grid render farm and use them together with your own computers. We’ve built a service on our website that lets you recharge your account with credit which you can then use with this system. So you can expect that this will be officially released soon.
We’ll definitely keep going, Crowdrender is here to stay and grow more useful for users.
I am having trouble getting my account verified.
No email was send to my emailaddress. Resending generates error message in browser.
Is the website / service down or development stopped?
Hi Bart, awesome to hear from you, so sorry about the lack of service on our website right now. We’ve just moved our e-mail server across to another provider and the account is not setup properly, we’re investigating now.
If you can provide me with the e-mail you used to setup the account, I am more than happy to verify it manually which will grant you access to the software.
Hi Bart, ok, we’re on it, it might take me a bit, currently at the day job, so I’ll do this in about 8 hours or so from now when I am at home
You should have access then, but I will e-mail you. Seems we can send e-mail from our computers, just not automatically from our server, still working on that
I managed To download the addon. I am at the office right now. In 4 hours I will test the 2.8 addon. I guess you will sleeping in Australia. So excited to test this. Already a great testimonial from my fellow countryman Midge Sinnaeve. That’s a great reference to have in my opinion.
With mixed setups it does work, you might find that the first render is slow, but over time as you do more and more, the addon learns the strength of each computer and adjusts.
If you want to adjust the balancing manually there is a menu to adjust how much screen area each computer gets for each frame. This manual mode is better for single frames, automatic (the default) is better for animations since the balance is adjusted for you with data from each frame rendered.
At home all nodes synced fearly easy. Only the still frame I wanted to render didn’t. I think it’s because I have to use the CPU Experimental setting. I use micro displacement in my scene. I get a rather slow render-speed and also only a little part is finally rendered?
Doing the scene with GPU is even worse. Nothing renders. But also here I guess it’s because of my scene specs. Only with CPU Experimental I have the must-have Adaptive Subdivision. So it’s more a story of Blender limitations.
I guess I will have to stick with the oldschool manual render for my 45 stills I have to get ready for print:-( That mean very big image formats and lowering the sample rate to 256 in order to finish on time.
I think the weird gaps in the final reconstruction of the complete image was because I enabled the “Auto tiles” addon on all nodes before which probably interfere with the “Crowdrender” addon.
Only struggling with image textures that are used for the displacement.
They only show up on the server side:
I will get to you back after this project ends.
First trying the get to the deadline with one computer running 24/7 in solo mode:
I have no time to waste anymore. Deadline is coming very close…
Definitely going to dig deeper for future projects after this one.
Hi Bart, auto tile size could cause some problems where it changes the size of the render tiles, though this shouldn’t cause the kind of tearing that you were seeing. Lets talk when your project is finished? I’d like to dig into this to see what the issue really is.
Here’s hoping more will follow
