I'm trying to have two machines (both Macs) render the same sequence simultaneously - sharing the workload - by having them output frames to a shared folder while skipping existing frames. This is normal for other 2D/3D packages, but I understand I'm in a different world here.

It can only work if the renderer creates a placeholder image file as it's about to start rendering, but Houdini seems to do that OK - when H starts to render a frame, it creates an empty (say) “myscene_0004.exr” file ready to accept the rendered image, so if another machine were to look in the folder, it ought to skip on to the next frame automatically. But it doesn't seem to be working.

I have Houdini Indie on one machine, and I'm using hbatch with a Houdini Indie Engine license on the other. Both machines will happily render my scene, and as the mantra ROP is set to “Skip existing frames”, they won't try rendering any frames that already exist in the folder.

But it seems they only check the folder for existing files at the start of the job, rather than frame by frame as they go. This means that when I start the machines, they'll both skip any files that already exist, but from then on they each render every frame, ignoring the fact that the other one has already done it.

So:

- am I right in thinking Houdini only checks for existing frames at the start of the job, rather than at the start of each frame?
- if so, is there an easy way to get round this problem?

I'm guessing that instead of using Houdini or hbatch to render a range in one go, I need to write a script that steps through each frame one at a time, giving Houdini a chance to check there-and-then if the next frame is already being handled by the other machine.

Thoughts? Am I doing something stoopid (not unlikely)?

(I suppose Hqueue is the proper way to orchestrate multiple render machines, but that seems overkill for little ole' me, and frankly, the docs for hqueue are somewhat opaque)

I have almost the same problem. I'm using Windows 10, Hou 16.5, and Hscript with the mread and render commands. When 2 PC's are rendering the same scene, sometimes the 2 PC will attempt to render the same image, which results in a corrupt picture.
Is it only the 2 of us having this issue?
Gz