Render Slaves Scene stuck at first frame

[Ondra]

what do you mean? you mean submitting a job with DR active to backburner does not work? That AFAIK does not work also in 1.0, nothing should have changed there

[fobus]

You're right. I forgot that it hasn't work earlier too.

...and because of this everyone who wants to render more than one frame has to have one full licensed PC just for rendering purposes (as he can't send a job to backburner).

[Frood]

Could you clarify that a little bit? Basically what you would like to achieve is a sort of "clustering" of slaves in Backburner like it is possible e.g. with mental ray and it´s satellites? So that a single BB job (1 frame) uses not only one slave but multiple ones?

In that case I don´t understand why you wrote "[...] who wants to render more than one frame [...]". Because even if you have to render 1 single frame you can´t use all slaves by submitting it to BB. You have to render it locally. But consider Render Setup -> coronaRenderer -> Performance Settings -> # of threads (=cores to use). Set this to [your_core_count]-1 and let the frame(s) render with all slaves included. You can still work at your box and if RAM isn´t the issue you will not even notice.

[fobus]

Hm... You're right. Even one frame needs a workstation to be rendered distributively. Of course you can render parallel with work on youre own PC, but when scene rendere with lot of RAM it is ineffective.

[Ondra]

AFAIK the NYX DBR can help here... I recommend checking it out to see if it can help you (and you get discount for it with corona purchase ;))

[fobus]

AFAIK the NYX DBR can help here... I recommend checking it out to see if it can help you (and you get discount for it with corona purchase ;))

I think it will be much better to just have a fully working feature in Corona, than buying another tool for DR. Is this really that hard to implement DR support fro backburner jobs?

[Ondra]

I mean... this is the solution you can use today. Additional tweaks for Corona DR will take time

[fflasshh]

I just scrolled trough the topic. I've been testing version 1.0 with max 2014, and DR worked fine with animation. I used corona's own DR manager. I have one workstation, and one render slave. Each frame took about 10 mins to render with both computers rendering the same frame. I didn't tried backburner yet, but the default DR of corona worked well in my case. There were no moving objects in the scene, only the camera.

[Frood]

I mean... this is the solution you can use today. Additional tweaks for Corona DR will take time

Did you for sure changed drserver in the latest hotfix version only regarding the frames-to-render bug? Or is it additionally a kind of experimental build? Just a discreet question.

[Ondra]

only that. It seems to be stable, and will be probably released as next stable build

[Frood]

While strange things happened here using BB I checked the logs and was surprised, hence the question. So please: what is the intended behaviour for the following situation right now:

- create some Scene
- add (ready to render) slaves to DR
- tick "Enable"
- submit that job to Backburner to one of the slaves

Is the local Max instance on the one slave(!) who renders the scene via BB(!) supposed to use the other slaves via CoronaDR or not?

Thanks!

[fflasshh]

Strange thing happened to me also, I mixed the two rendering solutions. But I figured out what the problem was... So If you use Backburner, "Distributed redering" shouldn't be enabled in the corona render settings. Because if you do so, a slave gets the job (one frame) from backburner, with the settings that it should use distributed rendering. this way frames get mixed.
So use eihter Backburner (to render more frames, and one frame per slave), or the built in CoronaDR (to render one or more frames, with rendering all the slaves the same frame, the same time).

[Frood]

fflasshh, regarding your mixed up frames see this thread, there is a hotfix for DrServer. I encountered mixed up frames only when using DR and selecting frames (not a range) to render but give it a try.

The question to Ondra is: Should it work like described in my post (one BB-Job includes other slaves defined in the file) or not. At least for pre 1.0 Corona builds (before slaves got saved into the scene, could be also Alpha 6, can´t remember exactly right now) this was (of course) not possible at all and as far as I can remember it still isn´t intended to work like this. One reason is a legal one, not technical. I hope Ondra can clarify (some day :).

Good luck!