Your experience with teamrender

[jojorender]

Hi,
I’m currently using Corona version: B2 on mac R18 on server and client.
I’m testing a scene that takes 39:28 min to render to noise level 5% on my main machine.
When adding 1 node in teamrender the render time goes to 29:29 min.
I didn’t expect render times to be cut in half, but definitely better than what I get.
Corona render settings “TR” is set to automatic. Network: wired 1 gigabit LAN.

I plan to use 1 corona license with 3 nodes (if that’s what we’ll get when released)
and send larger jobs that require faster turnaround / more compute power to a render farm. I only do still images.
If the LAN is a bottleneck, would upgrading to a 10 gigabit make sense?
I’m not even sure the gigabit is saturated as it is.

What’s your experience regarding TR?
Any tips on how to minimize overhead / get faster renderings?
How well do additional nodes scale?

Thanks.

[TomG]

Are the machines the same processor, memory, hard drive etc? Or maybe just give the results from each machine using the Benchmark, as there was no info given on their relative performance.

One thing that makes a difference is the size of the packets sent at once - the larger the image you are rendering, the more it may benefit from a different packet size (rather than using automatic). What resolution are you rendering to?

Cheers!

[jojorender]

Thanks Tom,
same CPU, server 64GB, node 32GB ram. I monitored ram usage on node os level - only about 58MB (edit:) swap used.
Both machine benchmark around 4 min.

Test image size: 3000x2000
Tex folder 850MB. Does it make sense to copy project to "Local Repository Path"?
I usually render jobs to 4050x2700px, higher than that and I'm often running out of memory.
What would be better TR config settings for this image size?

[HFPatzi]

Hi!

Here are my experiences with teamrender so far.

I'm using the latest Build "Beta 2 Final", Cinema 4D R18.057 Studio on a Win10 PC (i9 7940X / 64GB RAM).
My still images are mostly 9000 x 6000. I have 10 Clients at my displosal (8 x i7 7700, 1 x Mac Pro late 2013 with 32GB RAM and 1 x Mac Pro mid 2012 with 16GB RAM) and it seems that these 11 Computers together are about as fast (Maybe half an hour faster) as if'd render it only on my main machine (roughly 3 hours at a 100 pass limit). In my opinion it should at least be half as long if not faster than with one machine only.

Corona Teamrender settings are: Manual/update interval 5s/packet size 10MB. I'm working on my Company's Gigabit-Network.
Looks like sending back all the junks seems to be the most time consuming part but setting them too high caused crashes in the past. Also i experienced a slight decrease in quality when teamrendering compared to single-pc rendering at the same settings/number of passes.

Greetings,
Moritz

[HFPatzi]

Ok, after rendering a new Project with 20s update interval and 200MB Packet size, it renders way faster.
There is however a quality decrease. 50 passes on teamrender where noisier than 12 passes rendered on my main machine only.

[TomG]

Ok, after rendering a new Project with 20s update interval and 200MB Packet size, it renders way faster.
There is however a quality decrease. 50 passes on teamrender where noisier than 12 passes rendered on my main machine only.

Should be no quality difference - if there is, I'd start a bug report thread, with as much info as possible (including the scene, details about the machines, the OS, version of C4D, version of Corona, the images you are getting). Just to be sure, you allowed time for all data to be gathered from the slaves at the end, and for denoising to run after that? It might take additional time for that to happen (so the main machine may stop rendering, but still be waiting on data before denoising).

[houska]

Hi HFPatzi!

Thanks for your reports! As for the quality decrease though, this should not happen. There were some fixes related to the quality of the rendering in TR, but those should already be included in Beta 2 Final. May I ask you for some pictures, so that we can see the quality decrease ourselves?

Thank you!

[lenogre]

With very huge projects (10 millions of polygons), I prefer make a copy on slave PC because preparation is infinite with TR.
But for small projects, TR works perfectly.

[HFPatzi]

I will render out two images after the weekend for you to compare. Unfortunatly I can't send you the scene file because of a NDA but i will give you as much information and screenshots as i can get. It is not a big decrease of quality though. But I thought the result should be nearly the same but it is slightly better on a single machine with less passes compared to more passes on 11 machines ;)
I waited until the progress bar in cinema's picture viewer was gone when teamrendering.

BTW is there a way to teamrender a still image in Corona's VFB, since i like that one more?

Greetings and a nice weekend,
Moritz

[jojorender]

Ok, after rendering a new Project with 20s update interval and 200MB Packet size, it renders way faster.

Hi HFPatzi,
thanks for your feedback.
Can you tell us what you mean by “renders way faster”?
Is it now more like you expected? 10 clients a lot faster than the single i9 7940X
I had to look up speed and core count of the CPU’s you use.
i9 7940X  - 14 cores @ 4.3 GHz
i7 7700 - 4 cores @ 4.2 GHz x 8 = 32 cores + the Mac Pro’s (not sure about the specs)
I would also assume that (inc. overhead, LAN, etc) it should definitely be “a lot” faster than the single 14 core.

Questions for the dev team:
Do different CPU calculate pixels differently and maybe contribute to “noisier’ images?
How about a mix of PC’s and Mac’s in this regard?
Can you shine a little light on the manual TR settings and give us some “best practice” advise?   

Happy Black Friday everyone!

[HFPatzi]

Ok, after rendering a new Project with 20s update interval and 200MB Packet size, it renders way faster.

[...]+ the Mac Pro’s (not sure about the specs)[...]

Hi,

the newer Mac Pro is some intel xeon 6-core @ 3,5GHz and the older Mac Pro has two 6-core processors @ 2,4GHz.

[HFPatzi]

Hi HFPatzi!

Thanks for your reports! As for the quality decrease though, this should not happen. There were some fixes related to the quality of the rendering in TR, but those should already be included in Beta 2 Final. May I ask you for some pictures, so that we can see the quality decrease ourselves?

Thank you!

Hi houska,

here are the results of my test. I rendered full GI/Path tracing with a pass-limit of 15 and full denoising with the standard settings. Teamrender settings where: refresh rate: 20s, packet-size: 25MB. The upper half is rendered with my i9-workstation only, the lower half is teamrendered with all my renderclients mentioned in another post and the i9 as master. The quality decrease is more visible in areas with bump mapping. You also can see the specs of my render-clients in the screenshot.

I also attached a rar-file with the scene and the rendered images. Hope that helps.

Thanks for your support!

Greetings,
Moritz

[HFPatzi]

Hi!

Any news on that issue so far?

Greetings,
Moritz

[houska]

Thank you for the pictures and for the scene, Moritz! Your picture really seems like something weird is going on there. We will check your scene out soon and find out what's causing the trouble.

[HFPatzi]

Thanks for the heads up ;)