Cinema 4D Team Render, Part 03: Install and Configure Team Render Clients

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to install and configure Team Render Client. Either Cinema 4D or the Team Render Client application must be installed and open on any computer you wish to use for Team Rendering. In most cases, you’ll want to use Team Render Client because it doesn’t need to be individually licensed, and can be installed on as many computers as you wish.

You’ll learn about several different deployment options, and the basic installation process for Team Render Client. You’ll learn about important connection issues including Windows Firewall options and multiple network connections. You’ll also learn strategies for dealing with plugins in Team Render. You’ll learn about key Team Render Client preferences including Security Token, Custom Number of Render Threads, Fetch Assets Always from Server and Repository Path. You’ll also learn how to define a custom default security token using the c4d_net_securitytoken.txt trigger file within the application directory.

- To use a machine in Team Render, either
the Cinema 4D application or the Team

Render client application must be open in
a user session. In most cases, you'll want

to use Team Render client because it
doesn't need to licensed, and can be

installed on as many computers as you
wish. In this tutorial, we're going to

look at how to install and configure the
Team Render client application. Now if you

have already installed Cinema 4D on the
computer, Team Render client is usually

installed right beside Cinema 4D. So in
that case, you can simply double-click to

open it. But in most cases, your computer
won't already have Cinema 4D on it because

it's only being used as a render slave.
When it comes to deploying Team Render

client, you have three main options. The
first is to simply install on each client

through the Maxon installer application
just as you a Cinema 4D GUI instance. This

is probably the most fool proof method of
installation, as it ensures you get all of

the libraries necessary to run Cinema 4D.
However, it is a multi-step process that

can't very easily be automated. So when
you're installing on a lot of render

slaves, it can get very tedious very
quickly. Another option is to simply

install on one client and copy the
installation, and this will work well.

However, you do need to ensure that all of
the libraries are installed on each of

your render slaves. The benefit to this is
that you can get an installation set up

exactly the way you want it. Any plug-ins
can be installed in the application

plug-ins directory and you can simply copy
it then onto each computer. The final

option, and the one that I personally
utilized most is to install on a server in

a single location and launch each instance
from the server location. Now you do have

to be a little careful on this because
running the app does rely on the

connection to the server. However, it
allows you to have a single Team Render

client installation where you can manage
all of your plug-ins and updates without

having to manage separate installations on
each separate computer. Just like the

previous method, with this one you do need
to make sure that you manually install the

necessary libraries. To run Release 16 on
Windows, you'll need the Microsoft Visual

C++ 2005 redistributable, 2010
redistributable, and 2012

redistributable, as well as the Intel XE
2013 redistributable. You can find these

on the Microsoft and Intel websites or on
the Cinema 4D installer disk. It's also a

good idea to install QuickTime. While this
isn't necessary on clients unless you're

using special image formats or QuickTime
movies as textures, it's still a good idea

to have it installed. And if you don't,
you may see an error message on launch. As

of Release 16, Cinema 4D doesn't have any
specific library dependencies on Mac OS.

Now of course, most of this is all taken
care of by the installer if you manually

install Team Render client on each
machine. So let's take a quick look at how

to install Team Render client via the
installer, because you'll always have to

do that on at least one machine. So you
simply take your installation disk or ISO,

run the Maxon start application, choose
your language. Within the installer,

you'll want to continue through the first
screen, enter your name, company, street,

city, and country information here on this
page, but you can leave the serial numbers

blank and just hit continue again. And
because you didn't provide any serial

number, it will give you the option to
install Team Render client and Team Render

client only because it doesn't need a
license. Hit continue, and here we can

choose to install the application, we'll
hit install, agree to the end user license

agreement, and hit install again. Double
check the path and then on Windows, you

can create start menu entries
automatically. Whenever you're ready, just

click install. It's going to, on Windows,
ask for user account control. On Mac,

it'll ask for your password. Go ahead and
get through that, and wait for it to

complete the installation. Again, the
installation here is pretty much identical

to Cinema 4D, it's just installing only
the Team Render application instead of

installing the main GUI application. So
we'll go ahead and let that installation

complete and come back as soon as the
progress bar hits 100%. So now the

installation is complete, and we can start
Team Render client. We'll hit finish. Team

Render client should open immediately. The
first time you launch Team Render client,

or Cinema 4D for that matter, on a Windows
computer, you'll get a Windows firewall

prompt, assuming you're using the built-in
Windows firewall. And by default, only

domain networks is checked in this prompt.
In most cases, you'll want to go ahead and

check private networks and public networks
as well to ensure that Team Render works

properly. If all of your clients are on
the same domain, you may be able to leave

it simply on domain. However, in many
installations, your slaves will not be a

part of the main Windows domain or you'll
have a mix between Macintosh and Windows

computers. And in that case the domain
exception for Team Render client isn't

enough. So I recommend always checking
both private and public as well as domain,

and go ahead and hit allow access. On
Macintosh, you won't see this option,

however you do need to make sure that your
firewall is either off or that there is an

exception for Team Render client on the
Mac firewall settings as well. For more

information on adjusting the Mac or
Windows firewall options, refer to the

troubleshooting videos later in this
tutorial series. Now once we have Team

Render client open, you'll want to go
ahead and choose Help, check for updates,

and download any incremental updates that
have been issued since the initial release

of Team Render. At the time of this
recording, we're at Cinema 4D 16.038,

which is the third incremental update and
it is very important to make sure that all

of your Team Render clients are updated to
the most recent version of Cinema 4D, both

because everything must be on the same
version in order to run Team Render, and

also more importantly, because there's
very important stability enhancements to

Team Render that are happening with each
incremental release. So we'll simply

choose to install the update, hit install.
Once again, we'll need to accept the EULA,

hit install again, and just hit install
one more time. This is going to initiate a

download, downloading all of the updates
onto the computer, and then it will

install the update. So this, again, a
multi-step process, and I'll be back as

soon as it's finished. Once the download
has completed, you'll be prompted to

restart the applications, so we'll go
ahead and hit restart. You'll be prompted

for user account control, or on Macintosh,
you'll be prompted for your username and

password. And we'll go through the actual
update process. And this one's fairly

quick so we'll stay with you. And Team
Render client will launch once again. So

that's the most manual, but most
foolproof method of installing Team

Render client using the Maxon installer.
Once again, you can also choose to use one

of the other two deployment options we
covered briefly, installing just a single

client and then copying the installation
or installing and copying that

installation to the server and launching
each instance of your Team Render client

from a single server location. Regardless
of how you choose to install Team Render

client, you also need to make sure that
any necessary plug-ins are installed.

Generally, command based plug-ins and
scripts don't need to be installed on the

render instances. You do, however, need to
install any object based plug-ins, shader

plug-ins, rendering plug-ins, and plug-ins
of that nature that actually generate

geometry or adjust the rendering of
geometry during render time. To be on the

safe side, I'd recommend just copying all
of the plug-ins installed on your Cinema

4D station onto the Team Render station as
well. In many cases, you'll want to put

them directly into the application's
plug-ins directory, even if they install

in Cinema 4D within the plug-in
preferences directly, simply because Team

Render client will generate new
preferences for each user login. And if

you're utilizing the method of installing
on a single server instance, it'll create

new preferences for each computer and user
login on each local computer. So your best

bet is to put them directly into the
applications directory so that any time

Team Render client is launched, those
plug-ins are initialized. If you do have

plug-ins that must be run from within the
preferences directory, you can easily open

that by clicking into the preferences tab
and clicking open preferences folder. And

you would put the plug-ins here within the
plug-ins folder. Jumping back within the

preferences themselves, you'll find most
of the main Team Render preferences folded

under the renderer section here, so you'll
need to click the triangle here to expose

Team Render and click Team Render in order
to view the preferences. With Team Render

client, the enable Team Render option will
automatically be checked by default. The

computer name will automatically be filled
with the Mac OS or Windows computer name,

and the security token will by default be
12345 within Team Render client. The port

as of R16 for Team Render client is 5401.
And by default, announce service via

Bonjour will be enabled. Share machine
over network will be enabled and this must

be enabled in order to utilize the power
of the this computer within Team Render.

You can choose to customize the number of
render threads that this computer is going

to be used by other people and not
strictly as a render slave in order to

reduce the render thread so that the
computer remains usable while it's being

used for Team Rendering. And you can also
choose to fetch assets always from the

server. Team Render by default uses a
peer-to-peer distribution scheme where

other clients can provide assets to
clients. This does provide a little bit

better performance, however it can be a
little more error prone. So if you're

experiencing issues with Team Render, you
might want to enable the fetch assets

always from server option to ensure that
it's getting its textures and Cinema 4D

documents from the server computer.
Alternatively, if you're experiencing

performance issues, you may want to make
sure that this option is disabled so that

the server isn't forced to serve all the
assets but the clients can serve the

assets as well. The repository path here
within Team Render is the temporary

location where the Cinema 4D file and
textures will be stored for the job that's

currently rendering as well as the result
for aims there in the process of being

sent back to the server. In most cases,
you'll want to just leave this path to the

default path unless there's not enough
space on your primary drive, in which case

you might want to put it on a secondary
drive because it does need to store the

Cinema 4D file and all textures for the
job that's currently rendering. So if you

have a primary drive that's an SSD, you
might want to move this onto a secondary

drive. The repository path for Team Render
client should not be the same as the Team

Render server repository path, which we'll
get to when we cover Team Render server.

Now jumping back to the security token,
you may wish not to use 12345 as your

security token. And in that case, you can
type a custom security token right here,

54321 for instance. And in that case, I do
have to caution you to make sure to hit

tab after entering the security token to
ensure that it's stored. If you merely

close or switch out of the preferences,
the security token may not be stored and

it will still be using the default old
security token. The benefit to the

security token is that you can actually
limit who can access and utilize this

client for rendering. So for instance, if
you have an entire farm set up and it's

dedicated to the Team Render server, you
may want to set a custom security token so

that users of individual Cinema 4D
installations can't add these clients into

their Cinema 4D Team Render machine's
dialog and utilize it for preview

rendering. You can set a default security
token that will be used whenever Team

Render client is open, and you do this by
putting a text file in the application

path. So here is the application path and
I'm going to simply create a new text

document, and this should be called
C4D_net_securitytoken.txt. And within that

file, you want to simply type the desired
security token. So let's say we want to go

with 98765. We'll save that, close it, and
we'll restart Team Render client. And now

if we go into the Team Render preferences,
you'll see that the security token is

grayed out so it cannot be changed and it
has been set to 98765. So this is how

you'd set a custom security token in all
of your Team Render client installations.

Now of course, this is a little bit easier
to do on Windows because Windows allows

you to easily create a blank empty text
document. On Mac, you do need to make sure

to create a text document that is a text
formatted document, not a rich text format

document. And you do need to make sure
that it has the .txt extension. So the

file name should be exactly this,
C4D_net_securitytoken.txt. Now if we

switch to the console tab of Team Render
client, you'll see that immediately on

launch we have a little bit of output
that's provided within the window, that

the local machine was moved to the offline
list, the service was started on port

5401. Now I do want to note that the
service was started because the GUI app is

open. Team Render client does not run as a
service, so the GUI app does need to be

open in a user session in order to run
Team Render client. The next couple lines

here that are indented show the DNS name
and port by which you can connect to this

client or the IP address and port that can
utilize to connect to this client. If you

have multiple active network connections,
like for instance, when you're using wi-fi

to connect to the internet, and ethernet
or thunderbolt to connect multiple

computers for Team Rendering, you'll want
to make sure that each internet connection

is operating on a different subnet, so
Team Render doesn't get confused about

which connection to use. The subnet is
usually the third number here in the

sequence of four numbers separated by
periods in an IP address. So here you can

see that we have the wi-fi connection on
the .0 subnet and the ethernet connection

is using the .1 subnet. The Team Render
client will show all of the network

interfaces available on the computer. So
it's important when you add the client to

add the IP address that relates to the
connection that you need Team Render to

use. In this case, we would want to use
the 192.168.1.10 address, which relates to

the ethernet cable. So to recap, you'll
need to first choose one of the three

methods to deploy Team Render client. And
make sure that the Team Render client is

open on all client machines. You need to
ensure that the Team Render client is

updated either on each individual machine
or if you're using a central installation,

you'll need to update it within that
central installation. Install plug-ins

within the applications plug-in path,
again, on each machine or if using a

central server installation within the
central server installation. Plug-ins that

normally live in the user preferences path
need to be put in the application's

plug-ins path if possible, otherwise
you'll need to reinstall them with each

individual user login on each Team Render
client machine. You also need to make sure

that the Team Render client application is
allowed to connect through your firewall.

Finally, adjust your Team Render client
preferences as desired. If you'd like to

set up a custom default security token,
you can use a file within your C4D

application path named
C4D_net_securitytoken.txt. Now that we've

gone over how to install and configure the
Team Render client, we'll look at how to

add machines within the next tutorial.