Indigo Network Rendering Tutorial

[Blazedremedy]

Enjoy

[Borgleader]

I am SOOOO trying this as soon as i get home I hope it works.

[Blazedremedy]

sweet action, let me know if you have any trouble.

[Namiro]

i've just realized my first network render, it's easy and great ! thanks Blaze for the tuto... and, i'm a newbie on developement on computer but, can we make a network button in indigo's tools instead of using console ? ( apologize for my poor english.. i'm french )

[chubakueno]

One question. How is the last line?(apologize my poor english)

[Polinalkrimizei]

to make it even more easy: make a .bat file (windows executable) at your slaves so you don't have to type stuff into the command line window every time you wanna start a render. You do that by opening a text editor, type in what you'd want to put in the command line window, and save it as .bat.

you don't necessarily need the name of the scene to start the slaves, just type
indigo.exe -n s -h YOURPC:7777
where YOURPC is your PC's network name. 7777 is the default indigo port.
That way you just double-click at the .bat and your slave starts to render. indigo will automatically transfer the scene to your slaves.

Also nice if you have more than 1 slave: start indigo as a master on your master computer (-n m), not as a working master (-n wm), so your master doesn't participate in the render, which gives you some precessing power to keep modelling or runtest renders

[archigrafix]

network work fine at the office: all PC's on XP...but doesnt work well at home: one pC xp another on Vista. I have moved the indigo directory to root on both PCs and shared complet HDD on both PC, but noway. In fact Job is send by master to slave, but then I get this messsage:
Network slave connected from 192.168.1.22:49316
ClientProxy: MySocketExcep: read failed, error: [unknown]
Dropping connection to slave.
some help?

[cpfresh]

so is the scene transferred to the slave? does the slave rendering start? slave warm-up complete? why share the entire drive and not just one folder?

... 21 questions ...

[archigrafix]

cpfresh thanx for answering...or questionning
Since my question I did some test I completly removed any material with nkdata: cause I saw that indigo was stop by a material problem (on the slave computer)
It solved that problem now I see "done initial warmup", and all seems fine on the 2 computers... but waiting for some minutes and no image appear on the master?!
I dont understand why :
slave says: uploading frame
master: receiving frame...
but nothings appear... OH now it works image appear but it slow I think its because of my slow Wifi network: Frame upload took 604sec! so Ok about the connexion, and how about my nkdata problem.
I remind by the past had often get problems when moving from computer to computer with the "path" of nkdata.
some help on the subject?

[archigrafix]

Nobody can help with the nkdata problem in network rendering conditions? I am still trapped wiyh that problem. ".nk" file is saved in the master directory but packed and send to slave. So the all process is stopped because of that...

thanx if someone may help

[cpfresh]

Hi archigrafix,

I have a solution for you!

On your master computer, create a folder where you can export your scene to. (eg. On my machine I created c:\temp\indigoscenes) Then share it on your network as you would normally do on your OS. Next map it to an available drive letter. (On mine I used R:\ for RENDER LOL) OK this computer is set. Now go to your slave machine (or machines) and then Map your indigo shared folder to the same exact drive letter as you did on your master.

This way when you export your scenes to your R:\ drive (or whatever letter you decide to use) it will be the same exact path across all machines and then your problems should be gone.

I just set mine up like this and am able to do the nkdata renders where as previously they were erroring as you specified above.

I hope this helps you out. GL!

*edit*
When I say EXPORT I mean using the "Export Scene As..." menu option under your SkIndigo Menu. You only need to use this menu option the first time, then subsequent renders of this current file will always go to the same location.

[Nick]

Ehi guys,would not be better to create a video-tutorial?!

[Borgleader]

Ehi guys,would not be better to create a video-tutorial?!

You could always give it a go?

[Nick]

I followed what was written. But now i have this error:


Calculating energy loss compensation curve for exponent 10000.000000
Loading Complex IOR data from 'C:\indigo\netrendering/TX_Bagno1/Ti.nk'...
IndigoDriverExcep: SceneLoaderExcep: MaterialExcep: ComplexIORExcep: ComplexIORDataSetExcep: Failed to open file 'C:\indigo\netrendering/TX_Bagno1/Ti.nk' for reading. (In element 'phong', around line 101, column 9)


The network rendering start, but when appear this error...the slave is disconnected from the master!

The file Ti.nk is in 'C:\indigo\netrendering/TX_Bagno1/Ti.nk'!

Edit: I test some scene with only NK, and in each scene appear this error...

[Nick]

I solved the problem by creating a folder (in slave pc) with the same directory ie C: \ Indigo \ netrendering \ TX_Prova \ and copying the files needed nk!


But, why slave pc search the files nk in itself and not in the pc master? Thanks