Time per frame with Team Rendering

[LeSill]

Hello

I am trying to use team rendering for an animation but I am having some problems. First of all when I start rendering the animation in the VFB it works fine. As soon as I render I press TEAM RENDER TO PICTURE VIEWER I get an error about native cinema IES lights which are part of the native Cinema libraries. It is probably because they are not part of the Cinema Client. It is a shame but I can solve it by extracting the IES to another folder and place it back to the scene.

I wanted to render 75-250 frames. It started to calculate 162nd frame. WHY IT DIDN'T START FROM THE BEGINNING?

BUT the biggest problem I got is the TIME RENDERING using the team rendering. On my local machine is AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X. On the Client PC are two CPU Xeon E5-2650 v4. I have tested the same scene on both PCs and AMD Ryzen got faster than 2x Xeon about 40% - 50%. So I thought I will get shorter time when I do the team rendering and use all CPUs available. But by doing that I need longer time for one frame with using all CPUs than just with AMD Ryzen. I have checked the status of both machines in the TEAM RENDER MACHINE PANEL and the local machine got orange icon (working) and the Client got green (prepared but not working). When I checked the console it got messages, that the client is working in some passes and chunks. ANY IDEA HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE? This team rendering is really big issue. Especially for animations, when we don't see the progressing preview in the picture viewer like we can see in the VFB while calculating. I really like Corona and I have switched from Octane to that, but when I need to use distributed rendering I am thinking about Octane and how well this part worked there.

Many thanks for any ideas where could be the problem with the time per frame and the other issues.

[BigAl3D]

I'm guessing they need to see your OS info, C4D version and Corona version just for starters.

On the question of why is it starting on frame 162. If you have three or four Render Clients on your network, I believe C4D will distribute a chunk of frames to each client. If your first frame is rendering on a slower CPU, it will take longer to see that frame as done on the list then frame 162 this is being rendered on a faster CPU. Most likely what you're seeing there. If some of the clients dropped offline, it won't drop off until all the assets have been transferred over the network to each client.

Now that I mention network, there are a few threads here about how much info C4D/Corona sends over the network to each client. In C4D render settings, click Corona. Then go to the Team Render tab. My settings are Manual, 20 and 120 which seems to work great for my Mac and two Windows render boxes.

I also used to have a problem with the Render Machines window showing some clients NOT rendering, when I go to the PC and check, the client WAS INDEED rendering. That issue seems to have gone away.

[LeSill]

Thank you for your answer. I will test your suggestion and as soon as I finish current job I will try to do some other tests about the network/team render behaviour on a simple scene. Nevertheless I am a bit dissapointed about the Corona & cinema team rendering connection. I think that there is s DR for 3dsMax so it is a shame that they didn't come up with a proper DR for Cinema.

[davetwo]

Just an idea for you  - as TR can cause problems sometimes, it may be easier to render to PNG sequence (a good idea anyway) and then you can simply split the job between machines. Half the frames on one and half the frames on another.

Not prefect obviously. But quicker than spending a day troubleshootng the TR connection.

[LeSill]

That might be an easier sollution. Thanks. But I would have to buy another license of Corona I guess. I have both PCs on the same network so there might be a problem with the licensing. But I will give it a shot.

[BigAl3D]

Well, to render on both machines at the same time, you would need a full C4D install on both, would you not?