Yadra - Yet Another Distributed Rendering App

Published by Virgilio Vasconcelos on January 18th, 2008 in 3D News, Miscellaneous, Plugins, Toolbox

Have you just pressed "Ctrl W" to save the final version of that cool new animation of yours? Ready to render?

But, wait, maybe you happen to have some computers over a network. If this is your case, it's a good idea to think about Yadra.

Oliver Schulze wrote us about his tool that enables you to render your Blender animations over a network on many computers, which stands out for its easy setup and stable operating.

It's open-source and written in Java, so there's support for any operating system around. You can get info on installation and use on the wiki. One of its cool features is the web-based management tool, to take track of your brand new render farm.

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27 Responses to “Yadra - Yet Another Distributed Rendering App”

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1 Cubedude04 Jan 18th, 2008 at 7:47 am

This is awesome. Defiently going to try it out.

Just out of interest. I am currently trying to learn 3d studio max and it's interface is a horror compared to blender.

Stupid college courses requiring it =P

Blender, Don't ever change.
2 Fode Jan 18th, 2008 at 8:15 am

this is the first dra for blender that is native to windows that i have heard of. praise god for the thing
3 noazark Jan 18th, 2008 at 8:23 am

i have been using farmerjoe for quite a while now, professionally, and could not be more happy with it. the only thing to set up on the slave is mapping the master's HDD. and everything works perfectly, it kinda sounds like you can do it this way as well on Yarda. but does any one have any comparisons between the two?
4 ccherrett Jan 18th, 2008 at 8:51 am

ok very cool. I have it set up and it works nice. It will need more than just jpeg support

vey nice!
5 ccherrett Jan 18th, 2008 at 9:07 am

I would like to see a comparison. I am code diving into yadras source and being a java dev this looks very nice to deal with. I am wondering if the lack of say exr or png rendering is for a reason or you just hardcoded for testing?
6 melon Jan 18th, 2008 at 11:32 am

I use FarmerJoe distributed rendering for Blender (few months, commercial production).

It has some serious advantages over other solutions:

- running new slave is as simple as mounting network volume and run one program (takes less than 30 secs) on Linux, MacOS or Windows,

- sending a new job to queue is very quick and simple: choose FarmerJoeRender from Render menu (in Blender), so no app switching, no console running (takes less than 10 secs)

- for bigger images (no animations) bucket rendering is possible, so you can render 10000×80000 pixels bitmap quickly :)

Server installation is not difficult, works on Linux, MacOS and Windows.

FarmerJoe is simple, quick and efficient - deep respect to it's programmer.
7 Gustav Jan 18th, 2008 at 12:09 pm

yet another sigh!… there's so many of them ;) I think what blender really need is a official supported network rendering tool…
8 humble Jan 18th, 2008 at 12:29 pm

still wondering if this is really useful when using only two computers… is the distributing pc also able to render?
9 Reaction Jan 18th, 2008 at 1:07 pm

I find that the most important thing when using more than one machine is knowing their relative speeds - but there's no mention of that here. For example, I have 3 differently specced machines. I've done a lot of test renders to calculate their relative speeds so I know exactly how much work to give each machine - so that they all finish at around the same time (i.e. minimum time to complete the job).

It's great to have one machine control rendering on another, but not much use if you guessed the wrong proportions of work and have one machine working away for to finish its frames, hours after all the other machines have finished. Do these distributed render systems analyse previous render times to optimize the work allocation?
10 Hummm Jan 18th, 2008 at 2:46 pm

ok im a bit confused, im up to getting the computers to find eachother and want to start rendering a file. Where do i go to type that command that has the start and end frame ending with "JPEG"?

anyone?
11 ccherrett Jan 18th, 2008 at 4:28 pm

Hummm

It is in the wiki:

http://yadra.wiki.sourceforge.net/use_puttoqueue
12 Gryphon Jan 18th, 2008 at 4:33 pm

@Hummm:
It looks like you have to find the file "sendToQueue_NAMEOFSLAVE" (.bat or .sh) in the yadra installation directory /on a slave machine./ This file is a batch script(?) that will probably open a console or terminal window(?)

I assume you need to type
"c:\PATH_TO_BLEND_FILE\NAME_OF_BLEND.blend 1 150 JPEG"
or
"/PATH_TO_BLEND_FILE/NAME_OF_BLEND.blend 1 150 JPEG"
into that console/terminal window.

But can you tell I don't really know what I'm talking about? ;)
I'll check this out later myself. And maybe FarmerJoe too.

@humble:
No, the "master" computer cannot also render. Though I wonder if it mightn't be slightly faster anyway… is there a render preview, or is it like command-line rendering in linux?
13 Sandking Jan 18th, 2008 at 4:42 pm

I really tried to run Farmerjoe and found it really cumbersome and completely not user friendly in case of installing. I hope this looks better.
14 Hummm Jan 18th, 2008 at 4:59 pm

I did try running that file on the slave machine and a window did pop up for a split second and then closed itself. Thats why I got stuck. I ran both files on the slave and master and the same thing happened. That link is currently down ccherrett. :(
15 ccherrett Jan 18th, 2008 at 5:04 pm

Gryphon

The master computer can render. I was doing it tonight. I just register a new slave on the same machine and had it connect to it's own ip. no problems.
16 DramaKing Jan 18th, 2008 at 6:51 pm

I've looked at other apps for distributed computing, but have run into problems like non-Blender integrated and OS restrictions. I'm doing to strongly be considering this. Thanks, Oliver!
17 Gryphon Jan 18th, 2008 at 7:42 pm

@ccherrett:
Oh… That's a great idea!
18 Karl Jan 18th, 2008 at 10:56 pm

@Reaction:
I can't speak for Yadra or FarmerJoe, but I would suggest a look at DrQueue - it works by sending one frame/bucket to each render slave, and then waits for a slave to finish. As soon as one slave finishes, the master sends it another bucket/frame to render. This way all machines pick up work as fast as they can, and your renderfarm is used to maximum efficiency. DrQueue also has also been used professionally and is production-proven. Comes thoroughly recommended :)

Karl
19 vidrazor Jan 19th, 2008 at 4:54 am

Pretty useless if all it can render to is jpeg.
20 lindamus Jan 19th, 2008 at 11:45 am

Well,

this seems like a nice little project. Had a bit of a play with it all, but could not get the slaves to render output (from the looks of it).

Will keep my eye on it though, cause it does seem to be heading down the right track.
21 Aussiedude Jan 20th, 2008 at 4:57 am

I had a go at using the frameserver to setup a renderfarm of sorts when I was in high school last year. The computer lab I was in had 32 computers with this setup:
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz - Dual Core!
RAM: 2GB

With basically 64 processors around me I couldn't miss the chance to make a renderfarm. So I got my blend file, put it on the network. Opened the file on all computers and got the list of their IP's from my teacher. I wrote a C++ script that made a html file with a link to every frame in my animation with each computer rendering a near equal number of frames (about 250 frames so about 8 frames per computer). Then I used a download manager for firefox just to download all the links to frames in order with 32 frames downloading at a time. So that every computer was being used. Then I just downloaded all the frames to a laptop that was connected to the network.

It took a while to setup but it was worth it, worked like a charm when done. I probably did things the long way but I did so because:
1. I don't understand the so-called 'simple' renderfarm scripts and tools for blender
2. I didn't have the time nor the desire to write a script or tool myself that did all this automatically, I didn't think I would be doing it again either, so I just did it all manually.
22 Reaction Jan 20th, 2008 at 7:05 pm

I create AVI Raw files ready for conversion to WMV. So all I need is a program on the master that can be given the relative speeds of each machine (including itself!); then calculate how many frames each machine should do; then send a simple command (over a network connection) to invoke identical Blender installations (with the necessary .blend files also local on each slave machine). When any machine finishes, it sends a message back to the master, which then tells that slave to copy its rendered AVI chunk back to a shared folder on the master.

If that's *not* what these render farm managers do, then I think it's time I learned Python or reawakened my Visual Basic skills!
23 an8kid Feb 2nd, 2008 at 4:00 pm

wow…
i just got round to trying this today….
its sooo slow… it was so much quicker rendering on my PC than on this render farm…
24 Oliver Schulze Feb 5th, 2008 at 10:49 pm

Hi,

a new version of yadra is available on http://blendoli.googlepages.com/yadra. Heres a list of changes:

- implemented multiple-jobs rendering
- added a new background image
- show up all active slaves (even if there are no jobs)
- added the possibility to remove inactive slaves from list
- reordered the done-list (newest on top)
- added multiple output-formats (png, jpeg, …)
- made the web-ui more flexible, now it is possible to put the templates in subdirectories
- added rendering time
- added pause for slaves (all the time, not only for one job)
- removed some bugs, regarding the rendering process/made the process more stable
- made it possible to render multiple jobs with the same name
- worked-over the code, switched to Subversion (on Sourceforge) and Eclipse
- fixed error, when master wanted to move the work folder, and the slaves wrote into it, that didn't work
- Fixed connect timeout error (could lead to a deadlock on the slaves): added timeout to socket connect
- Fixed problem of config (passphares was not recognized when creating a new slave)
- Fixed Problem, when setting the work directory to the same as the start directory (resulted in 0-Byte Filesin Web-Directory)

Have fun using it!
25 birs93 Jun 2nd, 2008 at 8:13 pm

lol i tought it said disturbed XD
26 BlendMaster Jun 6th, 2008 at 5:35 pm

it ried DrQueue, farmerjoe, yadra, then blendermans render script, and a couple of others, including on from hazard but i have to say, i liuk this one the most so far, i guess its the interface or sumething, but its really easy to set up, adding slaves is a breeze, and i like that you can specify the ports and all that. so yeah, i liek it :)
27 Thomas Jul 8th, 2008 at 6:26 pm

Don't press ctrl+W here. haha