Cinema 4D Team Render, Part 01: Basic Introduction

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Instructor Rick Barrett

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  • Duration: 05:36
  • Views: 23098
  • Made with Release: 16
  • Works with Release: 15 and greater

Team Render is the built-in network rendering functionality in Cinema 4D Release 15 and later. It allows distribution of frames for animation and buckets for still images to multiple computers on the network.

In this tutorial series, you’ll learn how to install, configure, use and troubleshoot Team Render. Within this introductory tutorial, you’ll learn about Team Render licensing as well as various implementations that allow you to manage Team Render from within Cinema 4D or via a browser-based user interface connected to a central server. You’ll learn the advantages and disadvantages of each Team Render technique, and recommended strategies for various types of users.

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- In this tutorial series, you'll learn how to install, configure, use, and troubleshoot Team Render for Cinema 4D. For those not familiar, Team Render is a network rendering solution, which was introduced with Release 15 to replace the old Net Render module. Like Net Render, it's able to distribute the frames of an animation to multiple computers on your network in order to complete renders faster. Unlike Net, it's also able to distribute the buckets or individual portions of a single still frame to multiple computers as well, in order to optimize the speed of rendering for a single still frame. You should keep in mind that Team Render is licensed for use on your own projects, on your own render farm. So, it's not really intended for use by render services or on cloud networks. With Cinema 4D Broadcast and Visualize, you're able to use three clients at any time to distribute your render tasks. With Studio, there's no limit to the number of clients you can use. This is the number of clients that can be used at any given time. So, you can actually install the Team Render client on as many machines as you'd like, and you simply can only choose up to three clients when you have Broadcast or Visualize in order to use them for rendering. Team Render is best suited for smaller render farms. If you have a larger installation, I'd recommend looking at a dedicated render manager and the command line render interface for Cinema 4D. For information on command line render licensing, contact your local Maxon distributor. As of Cinema 4D Release 16, there's two fundamental ways to use Team Render. The first is via Cinema 4D from within the Cinema 4D interface. Or you can utilize the Team Render server. Each of these options has its own unique set of advantages and disadvantages, which we'll look at now. When working via Cinema 4D, you can Team Render directly to the picture viewer, which offers immediate feedback, but it has the downside of no central queueing. When you Team Render directly to the picture viewer, your project and all the textures are automatically distributed to all the clients. All your existing render settings are used and you'll see frames or buckets appear within the picture viewer immediately as they are returned from each client. The downside is that you can't queue up multiple jobs, and there's no way to manage the priority of your job in relation to others on your network. Another way to utilize Team Render within Cinema 4D is utilizing the render queue. Like Team Rendering directly to the picture viewer, this also doesn't require you to manually transfer the projects or the results. It will automatically transfer the project and textures and transmit the results back into your save path that you set within Cinema 4D. The render queue does offer the ability to queue up multiple jobs. You can also set different cameras and render settings from a single file within the render queue interface. However, you still don't have the ability to centrally queue how your job relates to other jobs submitted by other users on the same network. The other main method for utilizing Team Render is via the Team Render server. Team Render server offers a central queue, where jobs submitted by any user can be viewed, prioritized, and managed within a central web-based user interface. It also offers better debug and logging options and also the ability to remotely restart the clients as well as the server from within the web user interface. Now, it's important to keep in mind that both of these methods can be used interchangeably. A single Team Render client can be used directly to do Team Renders via the picture viewer, as well as Team Renders via the Team Render server. So you can use Team Render to picture viewer in order to more quickly preview your scenes as you're developing them, and then utilize Team Render server for final renders. However, they will not begin until the Team Render client has finished the job it's currently rendering. So, when Team Render clients are actively working on jobs for the Team Render server and you initiate a Team Render to picture viewer command, it may sit for some period of time, waiting for a gap between jobs on the server, in order to begin rendering your Team Render to picture viewer. So in summary, if you're a one man shop, a freelancer just working on your own, my recommendation would be to utilize the Team Render to picture viewer command in order to get quick previews of your scene, and utilize the render queue to batch up multiple jobs overnight, or when you're going to be gone for a period of time. In cases where you need to render multiple camera angles or many separate render settings, I'd recommend you utilize the render queue, because you can queue up multiple instances of the same job, and choose to render different camera angles or different render settings in each instance. Whereas with the Team Render server, you'd have to create separate Cinema 4D scene files for each camera angle or render setting. You can continue to work this way until you have more than one or two people sharing the team render installation. In which case, it's going to be time to jump to the Team Render server, in order to take advantage of the central queueing available there. If your shop's big enough, you might want to isolate a few clients that can be used by the Team Render to picture viewer command to generate quick previews, while the majority of your network is being utilized by the Team Render server. Now that you have an overview of the different ways you can utilize Team Render, we're going to step through how to install and configure each method.
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