Loki Render 0.7.0 Released
After almost five years, Samuraidanieru has released a new version of his distributed rendering tool Loki, adding better auto-discoveryand better file transfer for large projects.
I just finished implementing several features and improvements in Loki, making it worthy of a new release!
For those new to Loki Render, it allows you to setup a very simple and easy render farm without needing to specify IP addresses, setup a network share, etc.
Some of the noteworthy improvements:
- Auto-discovery is now much more robust and can announce and listen across all interfaces on both master and grunts.
- Auto file transfer and caching can now be enabled/disabled via Preferences or on a job by job basis. Most users will stick with the default of enabled. Users working with large projects and an external distributed network file setups can disable the feature.
- Master IP address can be manually specified for cases where one or more routers must be traversed.
Please feel free to download Loki and give the new version a whirl!
For those of you moving up from a previous version of Loki, make sure to delete the .loki directory in your user directory before using 0.7.0 to avoid conflicts.
You may have noticed that the wiki is a bit sparse; I was unable to recover content from the previous website (sigh), so please feel free to improve or add to the wiki in any way you see beneficial to the community; FAQs, tutorials, or whatever:-)
Cheers and happy blending:-)
Can anyone explain why this is needed if blender already natively supports networking rendering? i’ve even done it myself in the past with a bunch of ubuntu VMs running blender, working as slaves. I guess I’m not understanding the difference.
Because the internal network render setup isn’t ideal for all circumstances. Aside from that, this is the beauty of open source! If you don’t like how something works, change it to how you want it. (NetRender keeps crashing on me so I’m eager to get Loki working for myself)
I want to get this working. However, I can only seem to get it to work if the Master is running on Linux (Ubuntu). I can’t seem to get remote grunts to see the master if the master is on a Win8 PC.
Hi David,
I’m the developer of Loki. I developed and tested this latest version just on Ubuntu, and have limited access to Windows systems, so I appreciate your feedback. If you’re willing, can you please open up a discussion under the project on SF and details steps to repro as well as a stack trace from when it crashes? Hopefully this is something that can be fixed without too much hassle:-)
There are no steps, and no crash. If the master is running on Windows, the ONLY grunt that can connect is one running on the same machine and only if the IP is specified. All other grunts just keep saying “Attempting to connect with master” but never connect. Where do you want Me to stat the discussion on the wiki btw? … what page.
I think getting more info from you about the error may be unnecessary. I was able to reproduce this problem, and believe I’ve resolved the issue in the latest release which I’ve put up on SF for download. Please try it out and let me know how it goes. Also, I think I see your user on the Blender Artists thread, so let’s continue the conversation there.