Digital Art Zone

Hello all,

I’m new to DAZ3D (moving up from trusty Bryce 4), and I’m having some trouble getting Bryce Lightning to start on a machine I bought as a render box (dual xeon dual core, windows XP 32bit). I get the message “The application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix the problem.”

Tried reinstalling, but no change.

Bryce Lightning 7 installs and runs fine on my main box (Athlon X3, Vista Ultimate 64bit).

Has anybody experienced this? Or has any suggestions of things I can try?

Many thanks,

Rob.

I am going to move this post over to the Bryce forum, as there are peopl there who have used Bryce lightning, and hopefully can help you,

Sounds like a firewall problem. Bryce uses ephemerical ports. TCP ports 3416 and 3417 as well as UDP ports 28257 and 28258 must be open in the firewall. For each additional running Lightning client, the following TCP and UDP port must be open. You may also have to run Lightning as administrator. Ephemeral ports are often blocked by the firewall because they hint of a security issue.

Horo, thanks for your reply. However, firewall was fine. Turned out to be a well known Windows Side by Side issue (although the error message doesn’t elude to that.

Needed a VC80.CRT file - which is only installed via a Microsoft C++ 2005 redistribution installer. but first I had to remove (via add/remove software) all the current C++ redistribute installs.

So, Lightning now runs, but I can’t see how to make use of it. With Lightning running on PC B, I go to the Network Render Manager on PC A, but there are no configurable menus - the Settings button does nothing ( I guess because there are no jobs to alter settings for?)

Any further suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Great that you could make it work, Robert. You start Lightning on your client machine(s) and also on the host, i.e. the machine that runs Bryce to include it (though this is not mandatory).

In Bryce, File > Render Animation. A window opens, enable Render on Network on bottom left, then click on Configuration. Yet another window opens. Search the network, it will take half a minute or so. You will get a list of clients. Hopefully, they have green buttons. These change to amber if the respective client is crunching numbers. If you render a still picture, enable Use Tile Optimization, if it is an animation, each frame is already a tile and using Tile Optimization makes the render longer. For stills, a tile will be 100 by 100 pixels.

Ok out of this window, in the remaining window, set the file format as BMP by clicking on the down arrow next to Output Module, then Set the File Location. Ok out of this window. The render will eventually start. The whole source file is sent to each client, one by one, and each client who got the file signals that it is ready. The host will then send it the first tile.

You can watch the progress in the File > Network Render Manager. Hope this will get you going. (Render Animation for a still render on network is a bit confusing, I know.)

Thanks again, Horo - you’ve really helped me out.

Got everything running, now - just doing some tests to see what the best configuration is. The first results were not that encouraging. Individually both my machines render the test in about the same time (1:20:00) - yet with lightning, I’m only seeing a 25% performance improvements (down to 1:00:00) which I assume is down to the overheads/lag of the administration/networking of the tiles. It’s a pity you can’t select how the image is broken up and distributed.

Onwards and upwards.

Ah, good - it works. Make sure you set Priority to High to have all cores in your system participate. This must be set in the render options on the host machine and all clients take this setting.

yeah, I figured that out after worrying that only two cores were working on machine B.

I read a comment somewhere that if Tiling is not selected for single frame renders, the program sends 100 pixel x Image Height strips to each machine. I’m going to run a test and see if that works better. I also read a comment that said the Primary machine might be too busy rendering in High Priority to effectively serve out Tiles to the clients, so I might test with a third machine as the Bryce render manager, with my other two machines as dedicated Lightning clients.

I had a look at your work - it’s very impressive. I can imagine heaps of patience and render time went into the end results.

Thanks again.

Thank you for the kudos. Another thing you might have to consider is document size. Assuming that all clients have enough RAM to handle the whole file, the files are sent individually to the clients. If your source file is 100 MB, these 100 MB will be sent to client A and once that upload is completed, to client B, and so on. This makes up for a large part of the overhead. As a rule, I use network rendering only if the render will take a couple of hours, so that downloading of the file is a small part of the whole render process.

Once you have a network render going, you can again go into File > Render Animation > Configure and see how the clients do: green idle, orange working, red error. When the render approaches completion, one client after the other gets idle because there are no further unrendered tiles. You will notice that the slowest client mostly is chewing the last tile and make the overall render longer. It would be nice if we could assign which tile goes to which client. Then we could give the weakest machine the simplest tiles and the stronger ones the more tedious ones to even out the work load.