Network Render Farm in 2.80

Hi! Forgive me if this has been discussed elsewhere. I’ve searched as thoroughly as I believe I can, and have found nothing.
As a heavy user of Blender 2.79b’s “Network Render” add-on (I teach with Blender on a University campus), I’ve noticed the lack of network render farming ability in 2.80 beta. Is this a feature that is slated for inclusion in the final release? I haven’t been able to find anything indicating that it had been deprecated, but I also haven’t found any reference to its eventual inclusion. I’d love to hear something official. Thanks!

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This addon has not been ported over to 2.80 (and AFAIK it won’t be ported)

So for network rendering AFAIK you have three options for the time being.

1.- Flamenco in the cloud: for this one you have to setup different things in your computers and have a Blender Cloud subscription, you will have a server in your cloud account where your local manager can connect to and you will have all your render nodes available, in the cloud you just manage the whole farm, but no actual blend files or any other files are uploaded to the cloud, the file is locally managed by you manager, and you can have many managers, for example one for your local computers and a different one for an AWS farm.

2.- Local Flamenco: Since Flamenco is open source you can download all the required system to install the server locally, it’s a hard process, much more complex than just installing the Manager and nodes and AFAIK it’s not very well documented, but you will receive help to do that here or in Blender.Chat, with this you don’t need a Blender Cloud account but you will have to go through a harder process.

3.- CrowdRender: It’s an addon that will allow you to leverage a full list of computers to render stills or animations, is easy to install and you will be able to assign several computers to render just a picture for example, you can find the addon here, it’s free but you can donate to them to help them in the development process:

So far I think there are no more options for network rendering with Blender 2.80, if someone knows any other I’m curious, so if you discover another one, please post it here :slight_smile:

Cheers!

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Thanks for the response JuanGea! I’ll check those out. I still hope a port of Network Render will eventually happen. I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out the ins and outs of that farming method (I.E. where to place physics caches, packing libraries, etc). It’s a pretty elegant little system!

Currently I use Pandora and I highly recommend it
https://prism-pipeline.com/pandora/

Pandora seems to be pretty interesting, I’ll investigate it :slight_smile:

Thanks!

recommend to keep an eye on the other product prism too

Do they support 2.80 ?

yes, but you need to add it manually

What do you mean with add it manually?

They have an addon, right?
Is the addon 2.80 compatible?

Cheers and thanks for discovering that cool set of tools :slight_smile:

Hi @carlossifuentes ! I am using pandora and I am trying to get some help. I tried the official forum but I haven’t got any reply there, so even thou this topic is a bit old maybe I can get some help here :slight_smile:

Are you still using pandora? I have it installed on my local farm with 7 nodes. The installation and usage is very easy, but I keep getting errors from time to time about the coordinator not being able to access the slave configuration file, it says it’s corrupted and if I want to delete it. It happens quite regularly for every render node… Do you have any similar problem using Pandora and do you eventually know how to solve it?

is using the latest version??

Hi Carlos, thanks for your reply!
Yes, I updated pandora from the settings panel a few days ago, so I guess it’s the latest version.

Honetly I am still not sure that it has any effect on the render, but nonetheless I’d love to get rid of those continuous warnings. Also, I am now having another problem, but it is affecting only one particular blend file: some frames don’t appear in the output folder, even if the relative task is shown as successfully rendered.

It’s a pity, I love how pandora was easy to install, it’d be perfect, but I am having this little issues and the forum seems a bit dead, the developer didn’t answer any of my messages.

Hi, may I know if the network render add-on can be used in a cluster that does not have gnome-desktop. Thanks

we are currently evaluating Open Cue for the future:

Hello folks, for network rendering (both in cloud or to automate your hardware resources) you can concider BlendNet which is just released:

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WOW! This looks extremely interesting!! :hugs:

It looks cool, I’ll check it for sure :slight_smile: