Version 0.6.4 is the latest public version of CrowdRender which has support for Blender 2.93 to 3.6 LTS.
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If you are looking for older versions of CrowdRender, you'll find them all here.
You can now save any number of IP addresses for each computer in your list. Each of those addresses will be used to try and connect with the first successful connection causing all other responses to be ignored. You can setup your startup file in Blender to always have the right IP addresses for each of your computers, by adding a new node for each computer and manually entering their IP addresses and then saving your startup file.
We changed how the node settings menu is laid out, its a bit easier to read... in our opinion anyway!
We changed how online/offline is represented. Before online/offline status was the same as enabled/disabled for rendering which was the node and its buttons was greyed out. This was confusing since its not obvious which of these conditions is causing the greyd out ness. Now, online/offline is represented by a intact/broken chain icon.
Importing dependencies can fail if another addon has installed the same dependency, we've now limited imports in our addon so that we only import from our addon's dependency location, which is in your 'cr' folder.
Exports of your animation for use in other programs were very slow. We found that there was a lot of unecessary processing being done when we detected changes to the scene (which happens when a frame change occurs during animation playback). Removing that unecessary work now makes export with some third part addons faster and Blender's UI is also marginally more responsive as wel.
For info on how to use the new scripts, consult this blog post or this youtube video
V0.6.2 and V0.6.1 were packaged incorrectly. We use pyzmq for message queues, and recently upgraded to pyzmq v25. We missed that a component in pyzmq we use was removed. As a result we released V0.6.3.
Animation or still rendering requires that first any changes that have been synchronised to a render node are saved. There used to be a check to only do this once at the beginning of a render job. With the new render dispatcher introduced in V0.6.0 though, this broke and the addon saved a copy of the Blend file each time ir rendered a frame or a tile.
This new version introduces a solution that restores the proper functioning, so that the addon only saves your blend file once at the start of the job. This will save time setting up each frame or tile in the whole job where you blend file is extremely large.
Accumulating render processes on the local/master node during an animation render could cause complete resource exhaustion of a node causing the render job to stop. A check to not do this wasn't working, fixed and tested and the problem is now gone!
NOTE: This version has been repackaged to avoid a bug that was introduced when we updated pyzmq to version 25. If you downloaded V0.6.1 prior to 25th March 2023, it's recommended to redownload and install a fresh copy.
CR-908 Regression - remote sessions are uploading their client's files every time the project is opened, that's annoying, so we fixed it.
CR-906 The addon would just stop trying to reach our servers to get helpful info like all your render nodes and whether or not they were online. Fixed.
CR-903 CR fails to start with new installations of Blender, now starts just fine.
CR-899 Render Fails at 1080p with 9 or 11% scale set, or other odd numbers. Fixed!
CR-887 Blender versions 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 no longer update render nodes in real time for transform or render setting changes, fixed!
CR-867 Speed up animation rendering using frame splitting. We used to split each frame into tiles and render them on all your nodes. This was slow however, now each node requests a tile and renders it, then gets another one, and so on. This, plus a few other tweaks, makes it waaaay faster.
CR-915 Each tile or frame that is rendered on your render nodes has to be copied to your master, this leaves duplicate copies of the rendered parts of your project on client and render nodes. We now automatically delete all these duplicates so that the disk space usage is vastly reduced. Now, when calculating how much space your render job will require, its much simpler, it will be just the final output from Blender you need to consider.
CR-898 Make Autosave work in Blender again! Yep, autosave now works, and, you no longer have to press START to get the addon to work the first time you enable it.
CR-801 We got rid of the old system we were using for detecting changes in your scene. Now we use Blender's depsgraph feature which allows us to react without having to run code to figure out if you just clicked or pressed a key that might indicate you changed something.
CR-180 For the longest time, CR was restricted to only allowing one instance of Blender to run on your client/master machine. Now you can run multiple instances of Blender, working simultaneously on many projects. Render nodes support having multiple sessions at once too, meaning you can render from any of those projects you have open on your client/master machine, using any of your nodes.
CR-918 The new render dispatcher we wrote loved rendering so much, it would refuse to stop rendering if you pressed cancel. It now comes to heel when you call on it to do so. Cancelling now does what you expect.
CR-916 Multiview rendering support is included for this release, including for animations and single frames.
CR-910 Really slow nodes won't hog a tile or a frame. The faster, more nimble nodes can actually steal tiles or frames from slower nodes and complete them sooner, much to the chagrin of the slow nodes!
CR-896 You can now effectively pause rendering on a node by clicking the camera icon, the node will stop rendering after finishing the tile or frame it is doing. You can then unpause it, allowing for you to temporarily do something else with that computer. The job that was being worked on by the paused node gets compelted by another node in your pool.
CR-889 Single frame rendering was significantly overhauled allowing for faster rendering without the need for learning how fast your computers are. It will be faster out of the box for most renders execpt those that are so quick, or have a stupidly long sync time (sync time is the part of the render where nothing is being drawn yet).
CR-892 A HUGE Slooooooow down in Blender's UI was caused by us, us is sorry, and we fixed it. Turns out we name a custom property 'reports' and that broke Blender. We're now using the same property with the new name 'events' and Blender approves. The slow down is gone.
CR-890 Docker options were a bit confusing, for one they were different to the addon for the same thing, specifically starting a headless server. This new version of the addon has a revised option set and our docker images (See this pull request on our github repo for more info) are being upgraded to match. This will make running our docker images on your local render farm or cluster much easier.
CR-885 - Found a massive slow down in Blender's UI when using flared addon. To fix this we had to make changes to how we store the list of nodes in Blender's Scene. We also had to make the local node (the local node is just jargon for the same computer you are looking/sitting at) not so special and it now sits in the same list as all the other nodes.
CR-869 Blender Fixed Blender 3.0 and 3.1 crashing when rendering with the local device/machine. A patch was submitted to Blender and made available in builds from the 11th November 2021
CR-868 Fixed Invalid UTF-8 characters coming from a render process causing render nodes to just stop rendering. We now replace any invalid chars instead of allowing them to destroy us.
CR-848 Fixed an issue due to the OPENCL device being removed from cycles-X. We used to hard code the device types and this stupidly assumed that all hardware would have OPENCL and that Blender would forever support this device type. We now always ask cycles what device types each node actually supports to avoid this error.
Fixes
V0.3.2 had a fix for something we broke in V0.3.0, this version has a fix for the thing the V0.3.2 fix broke. More specifically, when attempting to render using Crowdrender, if you use the local machine, this causes a copy of your blend file to be saved and used in a background render. Saving the blend file triggers a dependency graph update. The way we were using Blender's python app.handlers to trigger the save occasionally could cause a conflict with another dependency graph update that was already running. This fix hopefully stops that from happening. Our tests seem to indicate its fixed.
We nailed a very annoying and difficult to kill (difficulty was apparently ours) bug. When rendering stills or animations, some tiles would occasionally fail to render and would either appear black or blank.
We use Blender's border render system to divide up single frames. The border system requires four decimal fractions between 0.0 and 1.0 for the xmin, xmax, ymin and ymax boundaries that the border will be restricted to.
We didn't realise that Blender stores these numbers as C floats that have less precision than python's floats, despite the coordinates for the border being available through the Blender python API. This occasionally caused tiles to be ever so slightly the wrong size as there was a rounding error converting between the python float and the internal C float that Blender actually uses for the border coordinates.
We've fixed this and have rendered complete animations up to 1000 frames with no more missing tiles.
CR-830 The switch to our shiny new rendering experience in Blender came at the price of occasinoal breakage due to an error that crept in. That error was thankfully fixed and resulted in a far more elegant solution being used. The problem is gone too!
CR-829 There was a bug where the file transfer code would forget to set something important, its now remembering to do that and transfer speeds are hopefully not compromised as a result.
CR-722 Autopack can sometimes really bollocks things up. So we made sure if you have used autopack, we dodge the bollocks should they be swung our way.
CR-855 A pretty major re-organisation happened, the main instigator was compliance with Blender's GPL license. So the addon should now be fully compliant, but also more neatly organised.
CR-833 Logs no longer balloon in size. We limit each log file to a max size, so your disk space isn't chewed by logs.
CR-819 We reduced the number of sockets needed for file transfers by one. This has made things simpler and hopefully less error prone!
CR-813 Tweaking of the file transfer code yielded a 4% improvement in transfer rate. Celebrate the small wins :)
Multiple render layers are rendered multiple times - *Sigh* Sorry, but if you have more than one render layer, you'll find that currently, blender will call one render for each one. But when in background mode, just one call to render your file will cause all render layers to render. Put the two together and you find you render each layer multiple times with our addon.
There is a workaround though, you can create multiple copies of your scene, each scene then has just one of the render layers you want to render. Using the compositor you can now setup multiple render layer nodes to get each render layer to reference the layers you want from each scene and now you're back in business :).
Interrupting an upload can cause Blender to hang - *Sigh* Sorry, again. So the issue here is that if you are uploading to a node, and then you eithe revert, or open the same file, or possiblly a different file, then Blender can hang.
Its best if you either let the upload complete, or use the "-" (minus) button next the "connect" button (bottom of the crowdrender panel's list of render nodes). Highlight any nodes that are uploading still, and remove them by clicking the "-" button. Then you can do what you will without Blender hanging.
Support Apple M1 based systems - We've included all you need to render with multiple mac machines marvellously. Also brushing up on alliterations too.
Support for cycles X.... ish - We've started supporting Cycles X, the first changes we noticed broke the addon. So we've updated it to support the new python API, though its still likely to go through more change and so you might find that more recent cycles x builds dont work. We tested with the daily build as of the 31st of May 2021 .
Fixed a bug causing sync fail - Normally when a render slave gets an update, it will do its best to apply that change. If the change results in the slave having different data in its scene, then it attempts repair. We fixed a problem where the repair was failing, and now it doesn't, which is quite joyous to behold.
Fixed another bug with load balancing - When rendering in cycles, we record the time taken to sync, and draw, which are the two parts of the cycles render. We use these measurements to predict the optimum screen area each node should get. Though we were recording the sync time incorrectly, soz about that, fixed it now.
Multiple render layers are rendered multiple times - *Sigh* Sorry, but if you have more than one render layer, you'll find that currently, blender will call one render for each one. But when in background mode, just one call to render your file will cause all render layers to render. Put the two together and you find you render each layer multiple times with our addon.
There is a workaround though, you can create multiple copies of your scene, each scene then has just one of the render layers you want to render. Using the compositor you can now setup multiple render layer nodes to get each render layer to reference the layers you want from each scene and now you're back in business :).
Interrupting an upload can cause Blender to hang - *Sigh* Sorry, again. So the issue here is that if you are uploading to a node, and then you eithe revert, or open the same file, or possiblly a different file, then Blender can hang.
Its best if you either let the upload complete, or use the "-" (minus) button next the "connect" button (bottom of the crowdrender panel's list of render nodes). Highlight any nodes that are uploading still, and remove them by clicking the "-" button. Then you can do what you will without Blender hanging.