Okay, I’ll start from the beginning. I took Suzanne, added hair to the scalp, then made the hair dynamic so it would fall somewhat naturally. The animation is 250 frames long, and if I render on only one computer, it does fine. If I tell the netrender to split the render into chunks, the first chunk (say, 10 frames) does fine, then thereafter I see no physics action (hair just stands up and fails to continue falling). I’ve tested this with various chunk sizes and gotten consistent results. the first node’s frames do fine and thereafter, nothing. Anyone got any ideas? Thanks.
edit: To clarify, it’s only the particle emitter/hair that does this. I made a simple cloth flag using the cloth simulation and it netrenders just fine. For the record, I’m using blender 2.70 if that matters.
Many simulations create what is called a cache. This is an external folder of data (typically stored in a temp directory unless you specify otherwise). You may need to specify this folder directly as a relative path, recalculate your simulation then copy that folder to all the network machines so the data is available on all machines when rendering takes place. By keeping your Blend file in a folder and making your cache folders inside that folder using relative pathing you can just copy the master folder to all render machines and it should work.
I tried that. the only problem is, the netrender addon makes those folders on the various nodes on the fly, so I have no way of copying them before the job is started. anything in the physics tab does fine if I bake it first, except for the particles, which includes hair. I’m not much at python, but examination of the scripts suggest the particle system is handled separately, so I can’t do much with it. Oh well. guess I’ll just have to not use hair dynamics and instead convert it to a mesh and try to rig it with bones to make it move…
Oh well. guess I’ll just have to not use hair dynamics and instead convert it to a mesh and try to rig it with bones to make it move…