- The Cinema 4D Release 16, Service Pack 3, or 16.050 update, contains many significant enhancements to Team Render and Team Render Server. You won't see any major changes to the user interface. However, under the hood Team Render has gotten a massive overhaul to improve both its stability and reliability. In fact, if we take a look at the release notes here and scroll down to the Team Render section, you'll see that beginning here with Team Render, there's been quite a few changes. I'm not going to read through each of them individually. I'll let you do that yourself. However, I'll summarize by saying that the client and server connections have been reworked so that they're much easier to make and they will stay connected much more reliably. Also, there's much more stability in actually completing jobs, especially within Team Render Server, and along with that the reordering of jobs in Team Render Server works much more as you'd expect. There's also fewer meaningless errors and many more meaningful errors. So you won't see as many errors in the console or job logs that don't necessarily mean anything to you. But hopefully, most of the errors that do appear will have meaningful information that will help you actually get to a solution. So obviously, I'd recommend that you install this update immediately, and of course you do need to install it on your installations of Cinema 4D, Team Render Client, and Team Render Server. Or if you're running everything from a central server location, you'll need to install it on that central server location. So of course, you install the update from within the online updater, which you can access if it doesn't pop up immediately via Help, Check for Updates. You want to make sure the 16.050 Update is checked and click Install. You'll need to accept the End User License Agreement and you can choose your options here, and we'll go ahead and hit Install. This will take a few minutes to download and apply the update, so I'll get back to you as soon as it finishes. So after restarting to finish applying the update, you can see that we're now in Cinema 4D Release 16.050, and at this point you're going to want to make sure to update all of your clients as well before opening the Team Render Server application. So after updating each of the clients to 16.050 and restarting them, we'll go ahead and launch Team Render Server from the same directory that we just updated. So I know it should be updated, and here you can see it is running 16.050. The first time you launch, you will likely have machines here in your Machines list that were from the previous installation. However, they will need to be re-verified in order to work properly with 16.050. They have this new icon status here of a red dot, which indicates that there's an issue with the machine. So what you'll want to do is just right-click and choose Unverify next to each of these machines, and then double-click them and verify them again as normal and now you can see that they'll work just fine. Now, if you have a machines list from the prior version, just make sure to remove any of the UUIDs that might have appeared after the security token in the machines list. You should be able to just load it using the Load Machines option. After just a second, we should have access to all of our machines again. Now, you may have some "Incoming connection failed: Remote peer" messages appearing here within your Team Render Server console, and those are from machines that are remnants within each of the machines lists on the clients. So you'll need to switch over to each of your clients indicated by the IP address here, and remove the Team Render Server computer from its client list. In fact, you really should just delete all of the machines from the client list in order to clean up that situation. Now, I've removed the instance of the Silverfish machine on each of those clients, and so I should be able to hit the X here in the console to clear it, and those messages should go away. In addition to adding the machines manually or using the machines list, there's a new option for adding machines in Cinema 4D Release 16 SP3, and that is using a trigger file. So the Woodchuck machine is not currently in my clients list. I'm going to go ahead and switch to it via remote desktop and you'll see here within my application directory, I have a text file called c4d_net_server.txt. If I open that up, you'll see that the format is very similar to that of the machine list. You have a IP or DNS name, a colon, a port number, and then a semicolon and the security token. So this is the instance of the server that you would like a client to connect to upon launch. You can put multiple instances of separate servers in here, or even Cinema 4D installations. Just separate them with a character turn. You don't ever need to put connection info for a Cinema 4D Team Render client into this text document. You'll only put a server or a Cinema 4D instance that you want the client to connect to automatically. So with that file set up, we'll go ahead and launch Cinema 4D Team Render Client. You can see that it found the net_server.txt file in the application directory and it's importing the machines, and it's importing Silverfish 5402. You can see that Silverfish appears here in the machines list on the client and it's already lit up green. If we switch over to Silverfish, you can see a message that the service machine went online and has been added. In fact, here's Woodchuck right here in our machines list. So that's a really easy way to add all of your clients to the server, much like you could back in the old Net days. The connection is still being made from the server side here. You're merely triggering the client to contact the server and tell it to add itself. So that's unlike what we had with Cinema 4D Net. But if you put this trigger file within a central server location and launch all of your clients from here, you can easily add all of your clients to the correct server without having to manually verify them or use a machines list. Now, just a couple other fairly minor changes in 16.050. The first is that Team Render now has a connection test built in. Verifying machines may take a smidge longer than it has in the past, because a connection test is now run each time you try to verify machines to ensure that the speed of the connection is adequate for running Team Render. As we've mentioned before, you do not want to ever run Team Render over a Wi-Fi connection. So that connection test is run automatically on verification of machines, you can also right-click any machine and choose it from the Context menu. If you give it just a second, it's going to tell you how fast it was able to communicate with that specific machine. One other option that we have now is an option in the preferences in Team Render that's "Keep B3D files after assembling", and this is fairly self-explanatory. Team Render uses Maxon's own B3D file format in order to transfer the final rendered files from the client to the server, and keeps those B3D files cached on the server throughout the render process. And depending on your output format either with each frame or after the completion of the entire render, will assemble those B3D files into either multiple image format files, or a single or multiple movie format files. By default, and historically, those B3D files are deleted once the assembly is completed successfully. This option if enabled will keep the B3D files on the server, even after the assembly is completed. I'm honestly not quite sure when you'd want to use this. I suppose it's a failsafe in case your assembly fails. Or if you have some workflow in which you would use B3D files in addition to your final output format, you could keep this turned on. In most cases though, I think you're going to want to leave it off as it is by default. So that's a brief overview of the Team Render enhancements in Cinema 4D Release 16.050. I hope you enjoy the enhanced dependability that this new update brings.