Local Distributed Rendering with Thea & Skatter

What is the procedure for doing this ? I usually render with Sketchup+Thea using three additional computers on my home network. If i install Skatter on all those render nodes, should that be all i need to do for the nodes to recognize the skatter objects (even though they wont have licenses) ?
(was especially curious how it would handle any dependencies, such as proxies)

I’m not 100% sure, because I can’t test it myself, but I think only the main (“server”/“master”) computer needs Skatter. Once the scene is exported, Skatter is not needed anymore.

Hmmmnnn…i tried it, failed and got this message, which i’ve never seen before, but its not very helpful
"Error: Failed to create pack file (C:\ProgramData\Thea Render/Temp/Session_00000029/Upload/temp.pack.thea).

As this happen in Thea itself, this is beyond our control, so you should contact Altair directly.

I too use nodes for rendering and can confirm that the contributing computers are assisting to render the information in the main file of the controlling PC. It is not necessary to install Skatter on the other computers. This is the same with proxies as well. The nodes load the information shared between the computers, so as long as the principal file is rendering without issue, the nodes should too. However, I doubt that the pack file is directly related to Skatter as it does indicate a Thea pack. This error is on the node computer?

Rendering on the workstation is not a problem - the results are great and skatter is doing a good job for the most part. The only problem is when i choose to network render. Maybe it is possible that the workstation can render even when some bitmaps are missing but perhaps the nodes will force an error when that happens. However, im pretty sure that every scene i have has at least one missing resource, and i never had this problem until i started using skatter. i will troubleshoot it some more

I decided to make a fresh scene and give it a try - and it works !. I really love the way it just packages everything up and gives it to the nodes, so you dont have to worry about file paths etc
Dont know why the other scene didnt work

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