Team render

[haffy]

Hi,

I am trying out Corona and I want to test Team Render, but I am experiencing problems. Do I need a "real" license for this to work?

[haffy]

This is what I want to know.
Does Corona Renderer and Team Renderer work like this?

You see the progress live on the machine you work on, in my case a Macbook Pro Silicone, and you see the progress from all you render nodes live?

[TomG]

For the original poster, we'd need to know which version of Corona you are using (e.g. if the latest daily build of Corona 8, the new licensing does not work for demos as yet). Also be sure to have C4D and Corona installer on all machines (and the same versions), and let us know which OS, and what error or problem you are experiencing in as much detail as possible.

[TomG]

For the second poster, yes Team Render works the same with Corona as other render engines (other than it's own licensing system, but that doesn't change what you do in C4D at all).

EDIT - personally I prefer using the Server approach rather than TR to PV, but either works.

[haffy]

Hi, I am using R25 and Corona 7 (corona-7-c4d-hotfix2-win) and I am running Windows for now, but will run Mac and Windows later.

I would love to test Corona and TR for real before I buy alot of HW. Do I need to buy a license for a test?

And what do you mean by "Server approach"?

[TomG]

You run TR Server on your main machine, and then TR Client on any machine you want to render (including the main machine if you like), then you can save your scene to a folder which TR Server takes as a list of jobs. You then start, stop, jobs etc inside TR Server using its web browser control interface. I use this for animations though, as I don't use TR for stills (TR to PV would be the best way to go for stills; the server approach would work for doing lots of different stills all at the same time, or animations where each client renders its own frame). All standard C4D stuff, so check C4D and MAXON tutorials for how it can be used :)

[BigAl3D]

@haffy I have a mixed render farm. I have used 2017 i7 iMacs, 2013 Mac Pro Trashcans™, Windows 10 i9 and a Windows 10 E5 v4 dual CPU setup. Overall, it works very well. The current version 8 (even v7) is very stable an fast on my little farm. In fact, I've even gotten away with rendering animation with different versions of Corona. I had forgotten to update a couple of the clients, but the animations came out perfect. This only work, I believe, because I did not use a version-specific feature.

Seems like they have squashed many of the bugs that plagued Team Render in the past. There are some settings in Corona that can help if your network gets bogged down. I'm sure Tom knows what I'm talking about. I don't remember the settings off the top of my head. There is a thread somewhere though.

[TomG]

I have found TR to be very reliable and understandable too, with no unpleasant surprises. The other settings are most likely the ones in the Team render tab of the Corona render settings - if you are rendering very large resolutions or have a lot of machines, you may want to disable Automatic configuration and go for Arbitrated (experimental) instead, then tweak the other two values to have a higher update interval and larger Maximum size of packet, which is send larger chunks of data but less often. This avoids the network getting congested. Only really applies for TR to PV, the server never has problems (one of the reasons I like it ;) ). Suggested values might be 30s update interval and 256 or 512 MB packets, though there is no hard science to it and it may take some experimentation - and only needed if you find strange things like rendering with TR to PV is actually slower than rendering on the one main machine. Hope this helps!

[haffy]

Thanks all! I am talking to Corona support as my trial license has expired, need that both on the client and the node before I can try. I have made tests with C4Ds physical render and it works great. Also made tests with Blender and CrowdRender, it has a bit to go before it can compete. I am very much looking forward to test Corona and TR (TR to PV as I only do stills), if it works as I think it will. We will buy at least one ThreadRipper and work towards it. Yes I know the lead time is monstrous..