Rendering a Baked Scene

[BeauDE91]

Hey, Guys Love this software. I have used crowd-render and even some of the other ones but none is as good as this one and it's so easy to use. THANK YOU SO STINKING MUCH. However, I have run into a slight issue, and I'm not sure why. I have a classroom of about 20 3D Animators and we were working on a water animation, the scene was baked on the host computer and sent to the other stations to render. Sadly though on the other systems it fails to render the baked areas. All other areas render just fine, but not the baked scenes. Is there something I am missing here? We are using the Cycles Engine with CPU and we also tried HIP as well but still achieved the same results. Any help would be great. 10 Systems were used. Specs of system. Windows 11 6bit Ryzen 7 5700G RX6600 32GB DDR4 2TB M.2 SSD All systems were on a closed network and applications were running in administration mode.

[LogicReinc]

As of the current version, the only thing that is copied over to render nodes is the blend file itself (so not any bake files). In the future I do hope to be able to copy referenced files, but as of now, thats not the case.

If there is a way to embed baking files into the blendfile, then that would probably solve it (I do not know at a glance).

A possible workaround to have external files work, is using Networked Paths. This is a more complex option available under the System tab where you need to setup a shared folder where you have the blendfile, and provide network paths for each operating system to where they can access said file. Instead of syncing the file, it will instead inform the clients to read the blendfile (and any relative files) from that path. Aslong as the bake paths are relative, this should allow you to use baked files.

But this requires a lot more work on your side compared to the auto-managed communication.

[HugoMskn]

What if before syncing, you zipped the blend file and the baked data ? then on the server side unzipped it ?

[Yo1up]

After doing some rudimentary research into the topic, it would appear as though bake data for some things is actually stored in the blend file.

This is problematic because baked particle systems don't render properly in BlendFarm and are baked into the blend file. you can verify this by making a particle system, baking it, and then moving the blend file to a new computer to be loaded.

Whenever I attempt to load a scene with baked particle physics in BlendFarm, the particles load but are all static in the position in which they were instantiated.

[LogicReinc]

@Yo1up I just did a very quick test, and can confirm that a simple baked cloth sim and a basic particle emitter do work fine in BlendFarm (Tested Blender 4.0.2 and 3.6.8 on both Linux and Windows). This was just a basic emitter and a basic cloth physics, both worked as expected. Ensure that "Disk Cache" is not selected, as that does write it to disk, and not to the Blend file. Also ensure you put the start frame to a relevant frame (Under the Animation tab), by default it always starts at 0.

(Blender 4.0.2 may not show up in BlendFarm due to blender changing their FTP for 4.0, I've fixed this locally and intend to push a release).

The only way I was able to reproduce it was by enabling Disk Cache. And as mentioned, you need to keep that disabled.