Hello there, I’m having massive problems with Team Render, currently using R19, but also had the same problems in R18.
Sometimes it renders the image sequences to .PNG, another time it would only give some of us .tmp files with cryptic naming.
Like this: 36EABB8D-2012-427E-B2BC-0CAC93391979.tmp
I use the “Standard” renderer, but could also see the issue happening with Physical.
Our Cinema4d version is R19.068 Studio. We are running on a g-bit LAN, wired (not wireless!) and static IP addresses. We have 4 identical artist workstations and 15 render clients in our render farm.
All machines are running Windows 7 64bit Professional. Workstations have 64GB Ram, Clients 16GB RAM or 8GB RAM. (It makes no difference, if just a few render cubes are used, or switched on one after another, or if just the 16GB RAM machines are involved, or just the 8GB RAM ones.)
So, the general setup for Team Rendering has been setup according to the Maxon guidelines and triple-checked with Ricks TR trouble shooting here on cineversity.
I’ve disables all plugins to test if any third party is causing it, but run into the same issue.
So, bonjour has been always disabled from the start. I’ve used “announce machines to network” as soon as it became available, to see if the problem persisted and it did persist, so I’ve disabled it again.
I’m now using a custom, local machine list file on the TR clients including the static IPs and import the machine list of the TR clients for the workstations from a file.
I’ve also managed to put the “c4d_net_debug.txt” file in my local installation directory to get the TR clients console output printed to my machines console.
I’ve tested it with a fresh scene including just a grey cube. Bam, .tmp files.
There is no error message in the client consoles, nor in the workstation console that would give a hint.
All machines pick up the render jobs, frame ranges are assigned like you would expect and then the frames are rendered and sent to the output directory in the network, but these file names are broken, making it impossible to read those as a sequence.
I’ve managed to bulk rename some of my 32.000 files to .b3d, but then I had no luck to batch convert those to .PNG.
I could only open one by one with the C4D image viewer and resave as .PNG.
It is also creating .tmp files if rendered to .TIF, .TGA, instead of .PNG for example.
It also does occurs, if send from different workstations.
It does also occur, no matter if the project is in the network, and is rendered to the network, or if everything is locally stored (the desktop, or just C:projectXYZ).
It happenes from time to time, independent from the scene file size. We would have it with 2MB files, as well as with 250MB files.
We have it happening with textures, or without textures and also with and with no plugins.
It also happened, no matter if the workstation that sends the job is part of the rendering, or is not part of it.
Difficult scenes with long render times and easy to render scenes with fast render times are affected, too.
Also, rendering to Picture Viewer, or in Render Queue both would give us .tmp files.
It seems as if, once a hidden unknown background process that assembles firstly the .b3d from the .tmp, and then the target format e.g. .PNG has been crashed, only restarting Cinema helps to get rid of the initial creation of .tmp files. But, after a while we’re back to only .tmp, sometimes with a few .b3ds inbetween.
Because of that, We’ve also checked the network speed many times with ping and looked into a file permission issue with our administrator.
BTW, I have been through every single blog- and forum- post out there, that just mentions the .tmp, or .b3d file problem with TR (17/18/19/20). So, others seem to have a similar issue, but no solution.
So, it is not the file path with “.”, or general usage of special characters in filename or path, like it is described on the cgsociety forums, it is also not a quicktime codec or HDRI on the sky object, it is not a missing font, or plugin.
The only, badly working workaround was to enable the watermark-feature in the render settings to print the frame number inside the image and then extract this with OCR software, and batch rename the cryptic filename after the frame number extracted.
But, this method would fail often for some numbers (e.g. 0 and O, 1 and I) and it was impossible to get pass-names along and scene-names extracted for thousands of files.
Maybe you guys have any ideas, where to look for a solution. Please help!