Network Rendering on small pool of macs and pcs

[friction]

Hi Everyone,
New to the Forum and to the wonderful world and
Community of Mandelbulb3D!

I'm Experimenting with the latest Mac/Pc builds of Madelbulb
and We are considering using it for a large Projection movie.
We will need to render several thousand frames at some pretty hi resolutions.

Im trying to speed up the renders here and hope you all can help me out.

Here is our current available set up.
7 mac pros on the floor, and 8 pcs that are on the farm pool for rendering 3D and 2D After Effects.

When I run a render with overwrite off, same name and output and settings.
and run it form anywhere else, they seem to render the same frame and not skip each others frames.
I have not successfully gotten multiple frames rendering simultaneously.
However If I have  several frames rendered, and set a new fresh render it will skip the existing frames as it should.

I would love to:
Set up several renders at the same time, at least on all our available macs.
It would also be great to be able to open multiple copies of Mandelbulbs on the cores and have each mac say with 4 renders going.
I was able to run multiple copies on a pc but not on a mac.
But both Pc and Mac, I was never able to render multiple frames at once.

Any help?
Thanks in advance.
 

[Sockratease]

...I would love to:
Set up several renders at the same time, at least on all our available macs.
It would also be great to be able to open multiple copies of Mandelbulbs on the cores and have each mac say with 4 renders going.
I was able to run multiple copies on a pc but not on a mac.
But both Pc and Mac, I was never able to render multiple frames at once.

Any help?
Thanks in advance.

Hello and welcome to the forums   

Have you tried just breaking the animation up into smaller pieces and have each unit render a piece of it.

Say you have 15,000 frames as an example  (since you said you have 15 computers you want to use) ; just create your m3a file and set computer #1 to render frames 1 to 1,000; computer #2 to render frames 1,001 to 2,000; computer #3 to render frames 2.001 to 3,000; etc.

That will work to create 15 "chapters" which should be easy to sequence in After Effects.

No networking or render farm coordination needed.

I'd try a smaller file first to discover any bugs in the process that may exist.  Perhaps a 1,500 frame test animation with 100 frames per unit?  Just to see if this idea has any unforeseen issues.

Hope that helps!

Good luck with it.

[friction]

Thank you for replying!

Yes that was Self gathered solution here.
But I was hoping to get something slightly more advanced.

I just do not understand what the program is doing
when I have the "Overwrite existing images" toggled off
and set several up to render they all want to render the same frame.

In after effects it sees a frame being rendered and skips to the next one.


Also, in a mac environment, I cant seem to open multiple copies of mandelbulb 3d per machine to have multiple renders on each mac.
Any Clue? I have tried all the mac tricks to open the same application multiple times, but mandelbulb3d doesn't want to work.

All in all though,
its an incredible software and Im highly appreciative
to even have these tools to enjoy and learn about mandelbulbs!

[Sockratease]

Personally, I would not open After Effects until all rendering is finished.  Furthermore, AE is not good for rendering big movie files - it's meant for doing effects on small clips.  A Non-Linear Video Editor is much more robust for full movie type files.

If using the Adobe Suite, I'd suggest Premiere Pro.  If not, perhaps Final Cut if you wish to edit on a mac.

Those programs will create a full video file much faster and with much less demand on system resources.  AE will still do it if that is all you have, but it will take far longer and eat up much more resources on whatever computer is doing the work.

As for multiple instances on a mac, no idea.  I'd try opening multiple instances of WINE and trying to run 1 instance of MB3D in each rather than multiple instances of MB3D in a single instance of WINE.

Also, when you say:

In after effects it sees a frame being rendered and skips to the next one.

Why is AE even open until all frames are rendered?

Sounds like your workflow is in need of an overhaul!

To keep all instances from rendering the same frame you need to set the start frame different for each instance.  There is no network coordination between different instances of Mandelbulb3D.  My advice is to set each instance to render to a different folder and work with multiple image sequences.  There is no way I know of to use multiple instances to create a single image sequence.

Hope that helps!

[friction]

Totally not a work flow issue,
Im not even discussing work flow here, Im just trying to figure out ways to push out more frames faster with the
group of computers we have here to work with.
We composite our work with AE and we layer finish and apply Depth of field in Ae, etc.
Im just comparing that when After effects renders with "Skip existing frames"
each instance of AE will render a frame and the next core is aware and goes on to the next frame.
Thus not having to set these frame ranges  for each render as suggested earlier with MB3D.
So I was just using AE as an example there.
I do how ever check the process of my render in AE, but that is not the issue here.

Thanks for the help though!

[Sockratease]

Totally not a work flow issue,
Im not even discussing work flow here, Im just trying to figure out ways to push out more frames faster with the
group of computers we have here to work with.
We composite our work with AE and we layer finish and apply Depth of field in Ae, etc.
Im just comparing that when After effects renders with "Skip existing frames"
each instance of AE will render a frame and the next core is aware and goes on to the next frame.
Thus not having to set these frame ranges  for each render as suggested earlier with MB3D.
So I was just using AE as an example there.
I do how ever check the process of my render in AE, but that is not the issue here.

Thanks for the help though!

I misunderstood.  My mistake.

Sorry.

It sounded like you were adding post work as frames render, which would be strange, thus my comment.

I don't know of any way to add more simultaneous frame rendering than breaking it up as described  (which you say can't be done on a mac, so I'm sure is limiting).

Good luck with it, and if you find a way to improve your use of multiple instances of MB3D running parallel, post it please.  I'm sure others will find it of interest   

Good luck with it!

[hobold]

Regarding multiple instances of an application on MacOS:

As far as I know, it is the Finder that prohibits running more then one instance, not a fundamental limit of the OS itself. One awkward way of running more than one instance is to simultaneously log into more than one user account, and run the application for different users. (If you have to go that route, you might want to allow "fast user switching".)

There might be some obscure way to launch an app from the command line. If there is a tool for that, then it will most likely be able to start multiple instances of the same app. But the desktop user interface might get confused.

[friction]

Thanks for the replies!
I was trying to write a simple applescript that tries to open from command I just dont know what to point it to.
on a mack you can open the package contents and see everything that is included in the wine wrapper.
But I have tried pointing the script to everything there from wineskin to the exe itself to contents/macos/wineskinlauncher

none are working..
hope to find a fix to maximize my rendering.
on a pc seems like its no issue at all.