Network Render

[Kozohana]

Hi, new here, B.Y.O.B. you're doing an amazing job with this, thank you. Came across Luxcore when I was looking for a way to create water caustics on walls, like in BR2049. I was hoping anyone might help me with a simple tutorial for setting up the network renderer, the one on wiki is just too complicated for me and the renderer itself is giving me a headache. I can't even figure out how to export a .fcb binary file. Please, help me out

[jayv]

Hi Kozohana,

I have found the network rendering function to be somewhat confusing as well, but I am able to share what I have figured out so far. This is not being written as any definitive guide, but rather some processes I have discovered from my own experimentation. I am assuming you are using Blender 2.82 for this.

First, to export a scene which can be utilized by network rendering:
- In the sidebar, go to Render Properties > LuxCore Tools
- Enable LuxCore Filesaver, expand the dropdown menu
- Change the output type from "Text" to "Binary"
- Choose a directory for the final output

Upon rendering your scene, there will not be output in the image viewer. This is because LuxCore Filesaver disables render output directly, and instead creates a binary scene file when initiating a render in Blender.

When opening the output directory previously specified to Filesaver, there should be a folder with the format x_LuxCore, with x being your scene name. It is within this folder where you will find the .bcf scene specification file, which can be used for network rendering.

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This section is where I have the most difficulty. When using network rendering, I find that it fails to begin most of the time, especially if the NetNode/NetConsole hosts are running different operating systems. At this point, I have been doing the following process:
- In Blender, set the render configuration to what I desire for the final output (resolution, engine, sampling parameters, etc.)
- Save the .blend file, and send it to the system which will be rendering
- On the host machine, open the .blend file and verify that the render output inside Blender is appropriate (LuxCore Filesaver may need to be turned off at this point, if there is no render output as specified above)
- Ensure that Filesaver is on, and export a binary/.bcf scene specification, saving it to the local machine

And to begin the render process:
- In the Blender interface, under Render Properties > LuxCore Tools, select LuxCore Network Render (some Python dependencies may be required)
- A pyluxcoretool prompt to select between NetNode and NetConsole will appear
- Select NetNode, and select Start node
- Open another instance of pyluxcoretool by going back into the Blender interface, and selecting LuxCore Network Render again
- Select NetConsole; under the Nodes tab, your local machine should appear as "READY"
- Select Add job, navigate to the directory containing your .bcf file(s), and add them
- The output of the render job will appear in the same directory, or in a subdirectory of, the location of the .bcf file

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I realize this might not be particularly helpful for remote rendering. I have spent some time trying to figure this out as well, but this forum post is about as much progress as I have made with this feature of LuxCore.

Hope this helps.

[FarbigeWelt]

Hi Kozohana,
...

I realize this might not be particularly helpful for remote rendering. I have spent some time trying to figure this out as well, but this forum post is about as much progress as I have made with this feature of LuxCore.

Hope this helps.

Remarkable first post. Fascinating pictures on your page. This one here
rso sb1
I like because of its colors, shapes and deep black contrasts to first's beautiful shades.

Welcome to this forum, jayv!

[jayv]

Remarkable first post. Fascinating pictures on your page. This one here
rso sb1
I like because of its colors, shapes and deep black contrasts to first's beautiful shades.

Welcome to this forum, jayv!

Thanks! Not to stray too far off topic, but I've been a Maya/Renderman user for a few years and have recently been experimenting with Blender/LuxCore. Network rendering is something I'm also very keen to get working, and one of the main reasons I moved away from that software suite. It's currently a bit rough to use it, and ideally, the network render function could work in a fairly streamlined fashion of just sending a project to a render server.

[FarbigeWelt]

Remarkable first post. Fascinating pictures on your page. This one here
rso sb1
I like because of its colors, shapes and deep black contrasts to first's beautiful shades.

Welcome to this forum, jayv!

...
It's currently a bit rough to use it, and ideally, the network render function could work in a fairly streamlined fashion of just sending a project to a render server.

Do you already know LuxCoreRender standalone version? It is located in add-on's bin folder. I did not try yet myself but actually you can run standalone with ssh on every system versions are available because the standalone can be started as command line / terminal command with parameters and its config file is easy to be changed to personal needs.

[jayv]

Do you already know LuxCoreRender standalone version? It is located in add-on's bin folder. I did not try yet myself but actually you can run standalone with ssh on every system versions are available because the standalone can be started as command line / terminal command with parameters and its config file is easy to be changed to personal needs.

Yeah, I just recently got it working on macOS last night. The reason I looked into it was for a feature to save/resume renders, and to periodically save progress. My workflow usually involves very high-resolution images, and render times can be days to weeks depending on the project, so this is critical in case of failure. Using the standalone version, I had some difficulties with an error which I believe is related to C localization in Blender (forum post on the issue here). I didn't see any options regarding periodic saving/automatic render checkpointing in the standalone GUI, and I might create another thread about this once I investigate some more.

[FarbigeWelt]

I didn't see any options regarding periodic saving/automatic render checkpointing in the standalone GUI, and I might create another thread about this once I investigate some more.

Periodic Snapshots!

I also wish this feature for a good while at least for BlendLuxCore.

I might check first but I think one can pause and resume standalone LuxCoreRender.
If both can be executed periodically or triggered by an event (e.g. a changed state file) and rendering resume is initiated on scene specific snapshot files (saved while rendering has been paused) the one could talk about serious progresses and big steps forward to reliability what also means ready to use LuxCoreRender in valuable productions.

{Principally halt conditioned snapshot files can be rendered on different OS, running parallel, then snapshots can be merged into one integrating all samples from rendered parallel and finally exported as one result (as output image, selectable from different formats (e.g. png 16 or 32 bit, exr 32 bit float).}