Crowdrender: How to Speed Up your Renders

hello everybody I'm Oliver from lenses comm and in this video we'll talk about an issue that affects every 3d artists and how to use an add-on to help improve it the problem is that render times are long long and boring so long and boring that sometimes you just want to grab your computer and throw it out of the window or just jump yourself because sometimes just for a single frame waiting a bunch of hours this is totally crazy so there are different solutions for this and one of them may be buying more powerful hardware this is expensive but yeah you may get an improvement in your render times but usually you want to use a bunch of computers because if one powerful computer can render faster imagine if you join ten computers that would be a great improvement in render times however it means that you would have to buy a bunch of computers you have to maintain them they consume a lot of electricity if you have them all in a room that room may become a sauna so do you have to be very careful with this and if you own a studio and really need to rent it a lot this may be a solution but it's not for everyone then you have online render farms and these are great I have used them myself in the past I used them in the present and I probably will keep using them in the future at least for a while and they work really well you just upload your file they use their servers to render it you pay them for the time that you use their servers and then you download the result this is really elegant it is very easy and it works great however we have a fourth solution what if you could use an add-on like a crowd render and use those extra computers that you have a home maybe you live with your family and they have other computers at home maybe you have a laptop lying around maybe you have an old computer lying around or maybe you have friends that have powerful computers at their places and yeah sure they may use them for playing games but that's not important why they can't stop playing games and let you use their computer for rendering right because it's a good cause so who in this video I'm going to show you how crowd render works and what it is and use it you may know they seen it's a popular scene created by my fan and he uses a common render speed test to compare different hardwood in blender program the developers tried rendering it with many combinations of hardware using their add-on to make sure it works and here are some what results so first they use their workstation and keep in mind that these are all renders done with CPU so if you have GPUs you may even get better times than this but with this I 545 70 with 4 threads they got 30 minutes 25 seconds this is a long time and so they tried then with cross render to join a dual scene server in the mix with 16 threads is a powerful CPU and they reduce the render time to 10 minutes 9 seconds this is substantial and then they added to the mix an Amazon server with 36 threats the add-on lets you add Amazon servers so you can pay for them of course and add them to the mix so you can get even faster renders in you can see that it got down to bit more than 2 minutes so from 30 minutes to 2 minutes that's crazy but they didn't stop there they wanted to take it a bit further and see where they could get it so they join forces with other people and they managed to get together 8 workstations and I will spare you the technical details because they were different workstations and they joined 5 Amazon servers to the mix and they got it down to 16 point one seconds so just this is just to show you how much the render times can improve from 30 minutes to about 16 seconds how amazing is that and sure not everybody has eight workstations lying around at home but this is why we have good friends that happen to be gamers with powerful computers right so crowd render is a free add-on that allows you to quickly build a render form connecting computers over a local network or over the Internet and use their power to basically help you increase render speeds want to use your friends powerful gamer PC to helped you render check want to work on your laptop during a trip or when you are at a client's office but render in your powerful computer at home check all you need is an internet connection and blender running crowd render in all computers if you want to use crowd render you just have to go - crowd - render calm and this website you'll have all the information you even have a forum where you can ask questions we can report problems and I can tell you that the developers are very involved and they will be happy to support you if you have any issue I've been collaborating with them for a long time and they're really nice people always there to help you you have a good documentation where you can see all the details all right that I'm not going to go through in this video this video I'm gonna keep it basic and short so you can see how it works and you can see the idea behind the add-on but if you want to dive into the details or if you need more information for some of the steps you will have to come here and now we have to download so to go to downloads you create an account and follow instructions once you have downloaded it you just have to come to blender press ctrl alt you go to the add-ons list and here I just already have it installed so I can enable it and of course you would have to install it so just go to install out of atom from file just let the zip file that you'll get when you download it from the website and click on install and it will appear here okay so enable it and this is the image that we are going to render and as you can see I already render it just with my computer not using crowd render and you can see that it took four minutes 50 seconds right so now crowd render appears here in the render tab of the properties editor at the very bottom and remember this step because this is exactly what you will have to do in your other computer so for example I will be using my laptop for this demonstration and in my laptop I will also have to install cloud render and enable it and once you have it enabled you can have to come here and click on start all right so now we have here some options remember you have to do this in every computer every computer has to be run in blender and crowd render has to be enabled and started okay so before we start I would like to show you the interface of crowd render you can see it's very simple there are just a few options but it's all we need so basically first we have this render steel and render animation these are the buttons that you have to press if you want to use crowd render if you go up and use these buttons that are the normal ones from cycles or press f12 in your keyboard you will only render with this computer as usual if you want to use crowd render and take advantage of the connected computers you have to render through crowd render okay up here you have this button that will lead you to the documentation so if you have some problem or if you need more information about some of the features or options you can just go there right very recommended here we have the notes that we have connected in this case I have this laptop which is Oliver XPS 15 it tells us information here that is synced here we will see different information so when we are rendering it will tell us that it's rendering right now is that it is synced so this means that this computer is load has loaded already the scene that we have here and it's ready to render okay we have these three options here this one to the left is for connecting it's the same then pressing this button right here it tells us that is connected if it was not connected or if if it had been disconnected or it's failing or something this node would be grayed out then we have the camera the camera is for enabling or disabling this known so you have a bunch of nodes a bunch of computers that are connected we can disable some of them so they don't render right and here at the end we have options in future versions there will be more options here but here is just the tiles that we are going to use in this case for this laptop I usually use 128 all right I'm gonna try now with GPU in this laptop this is a very basic GPU it's a 1050 GT 10:50 but well it will help us and this camera here is for this machine you can see that it belongs to this machine so if let's say that you are in a cafe with your laptop and you want to render at home on your powerful computer so you would connect your powerful computer right here and you may want to disable your laptop so only your computer remotely will be rendering and when the render is ready it will load it here into your render buffer alright as if you had rendered it in that computer that you're working on alright if you enable it it will use both computers you can have here other connected computers no problem with that these options that right here are for adding new computers removing them connecting the one that you have selected and resyncing all of them so when you click on resync usually if you have big changes in the scene or something like that or you want to make sure that all of the changes have been sent to the other computers you will click on resync and it will upload to the other computers the complete file and all of the assets now it is very important that if you have textures in the scene you actually pack them right so go to sternal data and pack them because this for now at least it only sends the packed blend file to the other computers so you have external linked files and stuff like that it won't be supported for now finally you have the open open cloud rendering panel this is a new option that is still in development so you may not have this option yet but basically it let us by making and creating an account on croute render you cannot credit and you can use Amazon servers here you can add some instances I'm not going to do it now but you basically add servers they are added to your list of computers and you can use them for rendering so the render will be a lot faster but the amount of time that you're using them it will count against your credit all right so just keep that in mind it's a cool feature a cool option for those times that you are on a deadline and you really need to get your renders fast so of course we need to know how to connect computers this is the most important part of crowds Rendell right so to show you how to do it I'm going to remove this one and I'm going to connect it again so basically I'm going to add a new node I can double click here and name it so it will be Oliver XPS 15 and in many cases just adding the name of the computer here it is if it actually feeds the name that you have in the operative system of the other computer it will get it and it will connect automatically all the times you will need to go a bit further and add the IP address and that would be it so just click on connect and this is what I like about cloud render it is really easy to connect different computers I have suffered with this with other software before so here let's go with one 92168 dot 1.53 in this case I already know the IP address if you don't know it check the documentation because depending on your operative system there may be different ways of doing it and you can see is a CC of the staff it's ready to render ok and in this case is synched because it had already loaded the same before but if you didn't if you hadn't instead of synced it would be uploading and the percentage of the upload and just so you can see it I will click on resync so it uploads the file again there you see it and this is nice because it tells you the process that this other computer is doing at a given point in time alright so now we are ready to render and before we start I have to mention that I had to pause the video and recording and I have to render this again so now I have a slightly different time than before but is still about 4 minutes 50 seconds and I will switch this to slot 1 so then we have both renders to compare and this is ready to render so we can do this I'm gonna make sure that here I have 128 that's perfect and click on render still right so here you can see that it tells you sometimes information about the other computer and about its computer basically it tells you jumps from the local into the remote computers and here in this menu you have to go up and you have information about how the render is going and here this is a very interesting thing because you can see that the remote computer has gone really fast and look at this you'd only rendered this little part so basically when each remote computer finishes it sends the information here and now this computer keeps rendering right here now for now the render only appears once it's finished in the future it will be possible to see the tiles as they are rendered so that will be great now what's going on here why did this computer do this well because at this point crowd render doesn't still know how powerful each computer is right in the future they will have a better algorithm to figure this out but for now you basically have to launch a first render that will let crowd rather know how computers are faring so right now for example this computer rendered a very small part and it was very fast right this other computer is still at 20% and the other one finished a while ago so what will happen next time that we render is that crowd render will allocate a bigger space in the render to the remote computer to balance things out and make sure that both finish at the same time and they both render as much as they can right so this way you'll get better render times so for this basically the more renders you take the more crowd render knows how powerful the computer the computers are and the better it can balance how much it sends to each computer so right now I will pause the render and will talk to you after it finishes ok the render is finished and you can see that the render time is exactly the same that we have before is it a coincidence well yes and no it is it is just that the basically this computer rendered everything and the remote computer only rendered a little corner of the image but now this time it will make it better so just keep the keep in mind that the first few renders are for training crowd render so it knows how to balance every computer on the list so let's launch a new one and let's see how it first this time all right this is done and you can see that now it has done a much better job just three minutes and 37 seconds that's a lot of difference all right so you can see that we got it down from 450 to 337 that's a great difference and keep in mind I'm only using the same computer plus a little laptop that has a very basic graphics card so you can improve this a lot if you join more computers or if you have more powerful computers sitting around or if you have some friend that owns a powerful computer you can connect to it through the internet and also use it for the render in fact while ago I did a test with James rendering in my laptop using his computer from Australia's hood that's pretty amazing so yeah that's it you can see how you can improve the render times a lot just using computers that you have playing around or other computers that you can find from your friends and family if you like what you see you can go to crowd render comp create an account and download it for free just keep in mind that it's still an alpha and you may find some hiccups while using it but again the developers are willing to help if you have any questions problems or find a bug also just to let you know that they are currently running a crowdfunding campaign and indiegogo you can find the link in the description below to get funding to improve the add-on and take it to the next level adding a bunch of cool features like for example sharing your computer with a friend using a link that would be awesome web app with information available computers render statistics etc tile by tile refreshing on render as I mentioned earlier better adaptive render slicing depending on how powerful the computer is and the complexity of render this would of course improve render times more control over remote computers using the power of remote computers for real-time render this would be amazing it would mean that when you are working on your materials and stuff you would get a faster preview on the viewport using the power of remote computers wouldn't that be amazing I have collaborated with crowd render developers for a long time and I know they have dedicated so much time and effort to the development so if you think that this add-on can help you in any way make sure to support them and I encourage you to visit their IndieGoGo campaign so they can keep improving it and make it even better so I hope you liked it and see you soon you will find all of the links in the description you

Channel: Oliver Villar

Views: 18,427

Keywords: blender, 3d, tutorial, crowdrender, render, farm, renderfarm, build, crowd, multiple computers, time, fast, computers, link, nodes, cycles

Id: PMBdM-Gu60I

Length: 18min 10sec (1090 seconds)

Published: Thu May 17 2018