Distributed Render Problems

[FakeAce]

Hey,

We're starting a production with Vray & Blender and there are a few problems with the distributed rendering on our little farm. The testing setup is DR WIN-WIN, although it is possible that some macs would join in if this is possible.
So I have a testscene in Blender and it renders fine when i just let it render locally. However when trying to use the DB it gives me just a black screen.

I have read the other topics on the subject that i found searching the forum, but I didn't find an answer to it.

I use a mapped network drive as the shared folder, also the normal exporter folder is this folder, so the path is x:\export\ in both of them.
When i press the render image with DB on I get the following log:



this log is from the client side of the chain. As you can see in the log I get 2 errors:
Warning: Camera POV is too small...
Warning: Scene is empty

Is this a problem with the path, project, other settings? Any help would me much appreciated.
If you need more information, please ask 'cause i'm not really sure what else is relevant to the problem.

Thanks in advance,
Jasper

[bdancer]

Re: Distributed Render Problems

I use a mapped network drive as the shared folder

Do you select this folder in DR "Shared directory" params and enter this share network name in "Share name" param?

[FakeAce]

Re: Distributed Render Problems

thanks for the quick reply. I'm not really sure what you mean with the share network name? In my tryout yesterday it just said VRAYDR, which is probably not good.
Today i changed the workgroup name of the 2 computers and filled that in the share name param, but now it still renders black and the slave doesn't appear to do anything although the master says it has transferred it to server 4.

I made some more pics of all the things that I think could be useful.




Many thanks!

[bdancer]

Re: Distributed Render Problems

For example, you are using C:\render\ as DR directory. You have shared it with the name "dr_share". Here are the settings you need:

[FakeAce]

Re: Distributed Render Problems

Thanks a lot! You brought me a step further. It's not giving any errors now, but there's still something.
He only renders part of the image. The final result now of a simple cube setup is this:


here is the log of the Blender command line:


Meanwhile the render slave command line keeps quiet saying "waiting for render requests on port 20207". The render slave has the IP Adress 192.168.0.135
The other IP adress is the client computer also running a render slave instance.

Let me thank you again for your great support! Kind regards

[bdancer]

Re: Distributed Render Problems

Check port setttings in "Distributed render" panel and on slave, both values (in exporter and in slave settings) must be the same.
Check if firewall is blocking port and/or vray.
Btw i guess you have 2 nodes in DR params with the same IP - this could be not ok.

[FakeAce]

Re: Distributed Render Problems

hey,

The ports were okay, but I've found the problem.
There were 2 instances of the render slave cmd line running on the node, one as a service and the other was running in a screen.
So I temporarily unregistered the render slave service so I could see the process and then it worked! if I just register the service now it will work too most probably.