Distribute Rendering

Hello!

I work at an office with a render farm which i am able to access to distribute lightmass rendering in unreal. I know the swarm agent can handle this procedure, and ive seen this helpful tutorial on how to do so. Tutorial: Setting Up Swarm for Multiple Machines | Brian Goodsell - Environment Artwork

However, the first thing it says is to put a version of unreal on every computer, but when i do that i get an error saying the graphics cards are out of date, and then the installer terminates the install. Those PCs are dedicated render nodes, so they don’t have any decent graphics cards because they are intended for CPU rendering only really, though unless I’m wrong, the lightmass rendering is also achieved using CPU.

Anyway, i ONLY intend to use those nodes for distributed rendering, not playing or building games. So is there a way for me to get unreal on the nodes so i can use the PC’s for rendering the lightmass?? or perhaps there is somthing i can put on the nodes to get them working without installing unreal?

Thanks for any help

Hi Dark_Jubei,

There is no need to do the full install of Unreal Engine 4 on each of these computers. You only need to make sure that Swarm Agent is on each of these computers in the c:/ drive.

You can grab the Swarm files needed in the Engine > Binaries > DotNET

Copy the files here to a folder on the C:/ drive then have the Swarm Agent file set to open automatically so that it’s running. Then you should be able to use Swarm Coordinator from your main computer to reach out to the Agents to connect.

Thank you!

Tim

Tim! your solving all my problems, thanks very much. One quick question, does swarm limit you to 8 connections? at the moment im only getting around 8-10 connections, i have 26 nodes i can access, would be nice to use them all if possible. Is there a setting for that?