How To Tell If Distributed Rendering Is Working...?

[Shalinar]

Hi guys and gals,

I just recently started learning about distributed rendering with mantra. I've been trying it out and I have a really dumb question. I have two machines, lets call them computer1 and computer2. So in Houdini I go to my mantra rop, in the Driver tab switch the Command to Network Render and use the command "mantra -H computer1,computer2", then hit Render To Disk. Ok great everything launches. Computer1 is my main machine (master), and computer2 is the slave machine I want to distribute rendering to. When I look at computer2, having just logged in and done nothing else, it says mantra is running as a background process, but the CPU is only at like 2-4% usage. I would assume a render would take up way more than that, since the master machine spikes up to 90-100% at times during the rendering. How can I be sure that the rendering is in fact being properly distributed amongst all the machines designated in the command?

Thanks,

Chris

Edited July 19, 2017 by Shalinar

[lukeiamyourfather]

Try rendering only with the remote host. Instead of "mantra -H localhost,remotehost" just try "mantra -H remotehost" and see what you get. Note the other machines rendering might take a while to actually get started. Information gets transferred over the network to start the render. Depending on the types of assets this can take a considerable amount of time. If you plan to render animations you're better off rendering complete frames with something like HQueue (or any other queue manager) versus distributed bucket rendering because there's less overhead and wasted computing time.

[Shalinar]

1 minute ago, lukeiamyourfather said:

Try rendering only with the remote host. Instead of "mantra -H localhost,remotehost" just try "mantra -H remotehost" and see what you get. Note the other machines rendering might take a while to actually get started. Information gets transferred over the network to start the render. Depending on the types of assets this can take a considerable amount of time. If you plan to render animations you're better off rendering complete frames with something like HQueue (or any other queue manager) versus distributed bucket rendering because there's less overhead and wasted computing time.

Hmm thanks Luke. I'll look into HQueue-ing instead, as this is an animation. It's mostly reading files from disk from a shared network drive that both machines have access to, so I was hoping that wouldn't slow it down too much (as opposed to having all the heavy sim info inside the ifd).

I just checked the frames that finished so far, and they're all fucked up. None of them rendered properly, something I've never seen with mantra before. I've upload an example of a "completed" frame using "manta -H computer1,computer2"

env.0004.exr