Render Manager 2.1 Distributed Rendering Issue

Title, once a DR job gets picked up by a node the other nodes just sit idle as if the DR job is a single image job. This is a major issue we’re facing right now.

@peter.sarhidai thoughts?

These can be because of a number of things:

  1. The master computer which starts the job will only allow anyone else to join if it reaches the Rendering phase, so after loading, preparing, building light cache etc…

  2. I can see that the primary distributor device is also the master computer for this job. This can lead to issues in some cases, because while the computer is busy rendering a job it takes away too much resources and it is unable to do what is supposed to do. Please try to set the current and the primary distributor device under the Admin tab > Distributor section to a computer that you are not rendering with. If that is not possible then when you set the pc to node mode set the affinity to all cores minus 1 or 2.

Also please be aware that 2.1 is a beta version, with many improvements and new job types but it is not tested to fullest. The 3dsMax and Distributed rendering part is not affected by this update, just want to let you know.

Thanks for the reply:

  1. That’s odd, this wasn’t the case for the previous version of Pulze we were on (the RC release), even at the pre-pass the nodes were able to join in. I can confirm the render nodes do join in after reaching the rendering phase in Render Manager 2.1.

I’d like to add to this that DR can be used to speed up the IR map calculation as well, so it would be useful for nodes to join the job immediately. I haven’t used the 2.1 beta yet, sorry if I’m mis-understanding.

Hi JoshH!
This behavior was introduced in one of the last RC versions last year and since then it has not changed. I’ll make a note for myself and have a look what will happen if we change this.

So you’re saying other nodes can join in to speed up IR map calculation then? This has not been the case for us on version 2.1.