Team Render kicks ass

[AromaKat 1]

Zook, it sounds like all of your problems will be solved if you turn off the 'enable team render' checkbox in prefs.

 

*Edit - sorry. Misread it and see its a licensing complaint now.

 

Get team render working, set up team render clients on each machine. For the machine you want to just render, turn on the render client and disable the team render within your c4d applications.

Edited February 4, 2014 by AromaKat

[RVA8 0]

Did Maxon and Adobe conspire to just destroy everyone's workflow?! No Net Render, no AEC support in CC - why? Why not introduce these things AND keep the old system in place, for a while at least, so people can take time to adjust their workflow? Disappointing. Glad I didn't bother upgrading.

 

R

[ChrisC 2]

...no AEC support in CC...

 

AEC support is still in CC. I get a couple of error messages on launch, but just click OK and carry on as normal.

 

As for TR, it has annoyances, and limitations - but it also has its uses. I've yet to find a sensible use for Cineware, but it's only meant as a start I guess, there's potential if the speed penalty can be overcome.

 

R14 can open and render most R15 files, so you can keep that installed and just use the improved modelling features, bevel etc in R15, if NET is crucial. I'm using this to get around the annoyance that zook mentions too - render in R14 on one machine, work in R15 on another.

Edited February 5, 2014 by ChrisC

[BoArlander 0]

Team Render just clocked in at 3 hours and 40 minutes. Single picture viewer clocked in at 3 hours 56 minutes. The scene is 1.08gb and has baked dynamics. The sim has not yet been baked to keyframes, but the baked interactions worked fine.

 

Only 16 whopping minutes saved. Not the kind of gains I expected. Wondering why it's not cutting the time in a third or half. Are there any tips to optimize Team Render. Like allocating more or less RAM to the picture viewer, etc?

[destro 0]

Team Render just clocked in at 3 hours and 40 minutes. Single picture viewer clocked in at 3 hours 56 minutes. The scene is 1.08gb and has baked dynamics. The sim has not yet been baked to keyframes, but the baked interactions worked fine.

 

Only 16 whopping minutes saved. Not the kind of gains I expected. Wondering why it's not cutting the time in a third or half. Are there any tips to optimize Team Render. Like allocating more or less RAM to the picture viewer, etc?

 

Try baking all the dynamics before using team render. If one team render machine starts rendering at say frame 100, it is probably doing dynamics calcs for the previous 99 frames so it knows where the objects should be.

[BoArlander 0]

Thanks but the sim is already baked via the bake button. I was trying to avoid converted to keyframes, but that might help.

[AromaKat 1]

Could it be that your network is choked up? Depending on how many machines you have going, that could amount to your local network being saturated.

[jblessing 0]

FWIW, I think I solved part of our problem by collecting all assets again, so that there are no textures being pulled from the content libraries. 6GB TR installs, and I can't used the content libraries...

[zook 0]

I did wonder why the TR install was so big. If you already have R15 on your hard drive, why does TR need another 6GB? Are the files installed that different from the main app?

[vozzz 2]

r15 and team render are same thing. you can just copy your cinema4d.exe file and rename it client.exe and it will start as a team render client.

[zook 0]

Hmmm. So the installer doesn't check to see if all the assets are already in the Maxon Folder? Lordy.

[AromaKat 1]

I'm running into a new error today. Rendered the same scene yesterday with no issue. All I did was update a display tag. Now 3 of my clients are saying "Rendering Error in frame 1: Machine is out of memory" but when trying again, the used RAM doesn't exceed 23%. (16gb of ram on each of the render cows)

 

My host cinema seems to hang up as well... I cant open it but my cores are being taxed at 100%... so I assume its still going...

 

Anybody run into this before? Its odd that other workstations, with even more memory than the render cows, are the first to go out.

 

Also... Frame 1 was already rendered, and it failed going up in sequence from where it was. (ie... just finished 70-80, now trying to render 81 but failed with error on frame 1), which confuses me more.

Edited February 7, 2014 by AromaKat

[BoArlander 0]

Could it be that your network is choked up? Depending on how many machines you have going, that could amount to your local network being saturated.

The network seems to be working okay. It could be that the project was baked in R14 and opened in R15. I will try some additional tests with a few scenarios. Hopefully I'll have good results to report.

[HEIDandSEEK 0]

3 words Maxon. "Skip Existing Frames" I got accustomed to this using 3DS Max in 2005. Why does it not exist yet? Imagine having a massive sequence with 5 render machines and then the server crashes. You want to start it up where it left off? Oh you can't, cause it assigned random groupings to all the machines and there is no "Skip Existing Frames" option. If anyone has a solution to this (especially YOU Maxon) Please let me know.

Thanks,

Michael

[vozzz 2]

Not the perfect solution, but might help to some extent:

 

Edited May 9, 2014 by vozzz

[AromaKat 1]

 

 

3 words Maxon. "Skip Existing Frames" I got accustomed to this using 3DS Max in 2005. Why does it not exist yet? Imagine having a massive sequence with 5 render machines and then the server crashes. You want to start it up where it left off? Oh you can't, cause it assigned random groupings to all the machines and there is no "Skip Existing Frames" option. If anyone has a solution to this (especially YOU Maxon) Please let me know.

 

We had enough, and now just use deadline to manage renders. Initially got it to manage EC2 instances and use team render for smaller things but team render just flat out blows. Never works right. So now we use deadline to manage the smaller render jobs too.

[Ratbaggy 1]

Way to fail Maxon. So frustrating.