Hey everyone,
We’re running into some frustrating issues with Deadline during our current Blender project, and I’m hoping someone here might have some advice. It feels like I’ve read every forum post regarding Blender (which is suprisingly few) and the documentation.
Here’s the setup:
- We’ve got a render farm with 9 computers, each running a Deadline Worker. Pretty good graphic cards. Mostly 12gb vram though. (One with 24, which is the fastest one)
- The repository is hosted on a separate computer in another room, and that same computer is also contributing to the rendering as a Worker. No one is doing work on that computer. It just sits there and talks to the other through the repos.
The Problems:
- It’s just slower than usual. Renders through Deadline are significantly slower compared to doing them directly from Blender. This wasn’t the case for our previous projects, so I’m scratching my head trying to figure out what’s changed. The things I can think of is that we’re using tiling now instead of rendering the whole frame. And we also have a bunch more view layers than regular projects.
- The Deadline Monitor is super confusing. It’s showing things like “Rendering frame 15/10” (how is it rendering frame 15 when the total is 10?), and percentages don’t seem to add up at all. It’s making it really hard to get an accurate read on what’s happening.
I’m wondering if having the repository on a machine that’s also a Worker could be slowing things down? Has anyone else had similar issues with Blender and Deadline? Any tips or things I should look into?
Another odd thing I’ve noticed is that on one of my Workers, while it’s rendering a job, the video card is listed as ‘Parsec Virtual Display Adapter.’ This only started happening after I installed Parsec for a completely different project. Can you even use a virtual desktop for rendering, sounds strange.
Also, is there any Blender heads out there who knows if Deadline has to restart Blender for each task? That I know adds a bunch of extra time. Saw on some post that Maya had a “batch tickbox” to get around that?
Would really appreciate any advice or pointers—thanks!
Cheers,
Max