Hi,

I'm having trouble setting up network rendering for carrara 7.2 on mac.
I'm using mac 10.5, without firewall. But I cannot get network rendering to work. All machines are intel macs. Anybody got it working?

Thanks

I'm not on mac, but can you explain your setup process in more detail?  

 You need to have the same Carrara Render node version for each computer.

Hi,

I have the same version on all my machines. On the main machine I have installed Carrara 7 Pro (7.2.0.73) and on the other machines the corresponding render nodes. No firewalls are turned on.

I left the settings (Render Room) on the host machine as default:
Port 1: 5020
Port 2: 5040
Port 3: 5060

ID: 192.168.1.xx (ip of the host machine)
Mask: 255.255.255.0

Tried both automatic as well as manual.

The rendernode preferences (Application )are left as default
Port 1: 5020

Not sure if I should change the Render Room settings of the render node.

The IP addresses of the systems with the render nodes are like 192.168.1.nnn

Log network connections hangs my Carrara application, so no debugging there :(

 Change port 1 to anything but 5020. (mine's 6000) There is a specific instruction to change port 1 in the modal dialog but it is easy to overlook. 

It worked! Great! I'm so happy!!!!
Thanks everybody!
They should default it to something which works out of the box (if possible).
Always thought the note meant that if I changed port 1 I should change it on all render nodes. Haha... I almost feel silly misinterpreting that line :P

Thanks again everybody!

 Now let's see some renders with that network helping you along!  :D

Just kicked off my network render :P

I reduced the tilesize from 128 to 64 to prevent idling of threads while the other are doing some heavy crunching (not sure if this is a good practice)

Waiting it to finish now.

 Many squares is a beautiful thing. 

The smaller tile size is most beneficial if the network machines have different speeds. If all machines are  close in speed, a larger tile size will yield better results.

Here is my first network render. Took about half an hour to render. I'm trying to model and render a Royal Poinciana tree. The major branches are all seperate Carrara plants. I could not get the tree to look the way I wanted with just a single plant. Trying to render with larger tile sizes now, since the machines are close in speed.

I need to get it to look more realistic, so any tips are welcome :)

The leaves don't look very realistic not sure how to improve that though...

 Nice start. The leaves are appearing too dark because they lack the translucency of real leaves. Placing the same color, but darker, as your leaves into the translucency channel will help with this.

Also, unless you like doing long renders, you may want to try Ambient occlusion rather than full Global Illumination for objects like this - at least while you're testing them. GI is expensive time-wise when rendering plants with leaves, so many times, I'll create a light array instead to imitate GI.

I added translucency to the leaves as well as the flowers and rendered it again.

 Shaping up nicely.

Not having much experience with light arrays, what is best practice? Should I create a dome and fill it up with lights? How many lights should I have?

Thanks!

 Really fast to do. It's all done with distance lights. Start with one and make it sky blue, turn shadows off, set intensity around 5 and aim it at about a 45 degree angle down. Then duplicate it and rotate 30 degrees. Continue duplicating until you have 12 lights. (sometimes 6 lights rotated at 60 degrees is adequate) 

You can then create a new distant light for the sun and position it where you want or link it to a Realistic Sky. 

If you have shiny objects in your scene, this isn't the best thing to do because there will be multiple highlights on your object. However, for non reflective objects and outdoor scenes it works great.