Vray Swarm... nothing sees nothing :- )

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Hey

I could not find a swarm forum so I'm dropping it here...

I've installed Swarm on my render nodes
Set License server as my license node
and Master node on all of them pointing to 1 machine. That machine is mostly empty, no software on it. So I was hoping it will server well as meeting point for all the services I need to push in.

In any case when I type the ip of that pc and port I get that pc node visible, but no other node is connecting.

If I type render nodes ip : port I get their own each swarm output but none of them sees each other... I'm totally lost... what do I do ? o.O

TIA

EDIT - ok so I managed to connect 2 nodes... but third node has dual ip address system, that connects to 2 different networks. Swarm seems to not be able to find that node and rather than using the IP I provide it defaults to other ip... what do I do there ? :- )

EDIT2 - ok it seems that I had to disable other adapter, reinstall swarm and then enable adapter... now it appears to work... well see if it will still work after rester...

Ok follow up question !

How do I package vray for maya to swarm? Or standalone?

Tried some swarming but all I get is "No versionavailable from ip/vray-swarm/v1

[hermit.crab]

Sending jobs to V-Ray Swarm is available only in V-Ray for Revit, Rhino, and SketchUp. If you wish to send and monitor jobs on your slave machines with V-Ray for Maya, you would need to use an appropriate for the host application render manager.

[moshev]

Hello,

We do have experimental support for Swarm in Maya, but it is in alpha state and not yet fully supported.

What works: Discovery of Swarm nodes from a master node. The master node can be a Swarm instance running locally.
What does not work: Discovery of Swarm nodes from broadcasts. Automatic installation of V-Ray on Swarm nodes.

The error you're getting is because there are no versions of V-Ray installed on your Swarm nodes. You can install V-Ray Standalone and then tell Swarm about it by editing the file C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\V-Ray\Swarm 1.4\work\vray-swarm\vray-versions.json to looks something like

[
  {
    "path": "C:\\Program Files\\Chaos Group\\V-Ray\\Standalone for x64\\bin\\x64\\vc14",
    "appSdk": true,
    "vrayVersion": "4.03.01"
  },
 ... other versions may be listed here ...
]

You can also use V-Ray for Maya as well, but you need to change the path to point to the folder where vray.exe is. Also set vrayVersion to the right version.

Again, Swarm in Maya is still not officially supported and you may encounter various issues. Adding V-Ray installations manually to Swarm is also not supported. If you run into issues with other products that use Swarm, remove the edited lines.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Hello,

We do have experimental support for Swarm in Maya, but it is in alpha state and not yet fully supported.

What works: Discovery of Swarm nodes from a master node. The master node can be a Swarm instance running locally.
What does not work: Discovery of Swarm nodes from broadcasts. Automatic installation of V-Ray on Swarm nodes.

The error you're getting is because there are no versions of V-Ray installed on your Swarm nodes. You can install V-Ray Standalone and then tell Swarm about it by editing the file C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\V-Ray\Swarm 1.4\work\vray-swarm\vray-versions.json to looks something like

[
{
"path": "C:\\Program Files\\Chaos Group\\V-Ray\\Standalone for x64\\bin\\x64\\vc14",
"appSdk": true,
"vrayVersion": "4.03.01"
},
... other versions may be listed here ...
]

You can also use V-Ray for Maya as well, but you need to change the path to point to the folder where vray.exe is. Also set vrayVersion to the right version.

Again, Swarm in Maya is still not officially supported and you may encounter various issues. Adding V-Ray installations manually to Swarm is also not supported. If you run into issues with other products that use Swarm, remove the edited lines.

Sweet thanks for info!

So if I manually install swarm, will it be able to start DR on that node by itself? I wonder if I can drop my overcomplicated deadline slave spawner or if I need to keep using it.

Regards
Dariusz

[moshev]

I think that for a single node regular V-Ray DR should be simpler to manage. I must also reiterate that the support is experimental and I can't say if it will be improved in the next release. That is to say, please do not base your production system on Swarm use in Maya, it may go away in a future major release.

If you still wish to experiment and tell us how it works for you - that would be appreciated. And yes, you should be able to run DR on any node where you install Swarm and V-Ray standalone manually and edit the json file as indicated. If anything goes wrong, make sure to read the logs accessible from the web ui via http on port 24267 on the node.