brianjensne

It takes a few days for my comments to show up so Chris, I can see how that didn't make sense. John, Thank you. I reinstalled the license server and gave the node license server the correct IP, which is the static IP I assigned to the workstation, and it is now working. But in the defense of Chaos Group, they did a good job helping me out. It took a few days at first but since then they having investigated daily to make sure I had everything properly set up. I really think the reinstall was the key to fixing the problem.

It has been a few days since I posted this and since then I have resolved the issue. I did a few things so I am not sure what the real problem is. First Choasgroup got back to me (They were on holiday and still got back to me) and said to make sure ports 20204 and 30304 have been allowed on both machines. When I first read that in my head I said "both antivirus/network protection software programs have been adjusted (Norton and Windows Defender) But then it hit me that I should go into Control Panel>System and Security>Windows Firewall>Inbound/Outbound Rules. So I made adjustments in there(Did I really need to do that?). Then Chaosgroup said "On the render node, V-Ray License server has to have the IP of the machine where the V-Ray License server is running". So I typed in the name of the workstation where the dongle is installed. And lastly I had on my machine another third party computer optimizing program that could affect its security as well so I uninstalled it. Now it works perfectly. My guess is that the third party program was the real problem.

I know this subject has been talked about over and over. I have read all the documents on Chaosgroups website as well as many other popular sites. I have set everything up as they suggested and gave permissions in the firewalls for both of my machines. I am trying to figure out how to use Vray on the render slave installation so I can use both backburner and DR. (Backburner works right up until it gets a "could not obtain vray license error) I am new to this but it seems like the set up was pretty straightforward. I have a dongle set up on the workstation and I have updated to online licensing. Both machines have the VRLCLIENT installed. both machines have a static ip assigned. No so on. I don't know what else to do. Maybe my license wont let me have a render slave install? Maybe I need to upgrade the dongle? I sent an email to Chaosgroup but no replies.

My last guess is that you just don't have enough noise. A couple things to try: Up the the strength above 2. Zoom in on the black image to see if there are gray areas because the render element image is usually black with gray spots showing the noise. My guess is that you just don't have that much noise. And lastly since my knowledge is so limited this is straight from their website but a good thing to double check. "While the denoiser can be quite effective at removing noise, it is not perfect; very noisy images can lead to artifacts and loss of image detail. For most scenes, use the Adaptive or Progressive image samplers with the Noise threshold parameter set to 0.05 or lower. Additionally, the denoiser works best when the noise levels across the image are similar (when the noiseLevel channel is as close to uniform grey as possible), so using very low sampling is not recommended."

I just started to mess around with the Denoiser options recently. I was wondering what you had your settings set to. Maybe you just need to hit the update button after you render? The ChaosGroup page explains it pretty well. I have been using the "Replace RGB element with denoised result" setting and it seems to work pretty well.