Render farm and different buckets

Hi

I am having some trouble with backburner/vray/renderfarm/whatever. One of the nodes is sometimes rendering with wrong light intensity. The textures are there. I am wondering if anyone else have had the same problems, and solved it.

Vray 3 and multi HDRI dome light setup. (one for light, one for reflections, one for specular), Vraysky in max environment. Bruteforce/LC

Our small farm setup is as following:

One dedicated computer working as manager and server.

Two dedicated computers working as dr nodes

Two workstations working as dr nodes.

Then we send out the jobs from any of the workstations to the manager, with enabled (in the file) DR for the dr nodes, so that we can get all load off our workstations while rendering, with the option to bring them in as nodes when we are not using them for work. Most of it time it works, but it's not currently reliable.

Here is the vrayrawlighting pass:

.

The beauty pass has the exact same bucket variations, and the drbucket pass shows me that it is the same node. The node has access to all the files. The node has the exact same configuration as the manager computer.

Now, trying to render again.

It works. So it is ... inconsistency. I love to troubleshoot that. Not.

I no longer know where to look to solve this. Sometimes it renders good, other times it renders bad. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

I'm not confident if this will be of any help because your buckets appear to be of a reasonable size and the light samples available should be good also but if you are stuck for other possible solutions:

I had an issue previously with darker buckets in Lighting and GI elements that was caused by the bucket sizes being too small in relation to the domelight subdivs (if buckets are too small for any significant light contribution to be detected in initial samples then the entire bucket is considered to be in shadow. Something along those lines). There is a better explanation in the thread here if it's of any use: http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthread.php?77462-Dark-buckets-Rendered-on-single-workstation-linked-to-HDRI-in-Vray-Domelight

It doesn't really explain the inconsistency in your results either. There are a few 'dark bucket' threads on the chaos group forum that are specific to distributed rendering as well but I guess you'll have looked to those for a solution already.

I've had this happen before, I wish I had an exact answer for you but try these things. First restart all of the machines including the workstation and make sure all permissions are the same for the nodes and see if that fixes it. If it didn't then try reinstalling Vray for that machine and see if that fixes it.

Also make sure all plugins are upto date and the same version. I had an issue a week back where I updated the Multitexture plugin on my workstation, but not on the nodes, and it caused incorrect buckets.

I've never been able to get a decent answer out of chaos group regarding this.

I had this for brief moment at 2.4 Vray. Just as it came, it went and I never figured either what was the reason :- ). Don't miss it...it was infuriating...

Don't know if this will help but i came across this problem just a couple of days ago and for me it was because one of the nodes was not picking up the hdri file i was using because it was on drive that was improperly mapped ... as soon as it could find the file the problem stopped ...

I've has this problem before. It was because the bitmaps were not linked properly so the render nodes couldn't find them. I had to go through the scene checking all bitmaps were correctly linked as well as any IES data and HDRI map and it solved it.

Also make sure all plugins are upto date and the same version. I had an issue a week back where I updated the Multitexture plugin on my workstation, but not on the nodes, and it caused incorrect buckets.

Did these buckets fail on the entire scene, or just the multitexture areas?

Thanks for replies people. Nice to know that others are having the same issue. I also had this sometimes in 2.4. It could be the HDRi's not picking up correctly, but the path is correct. And it also could be working the next time I try 1 minute after. Maybe there are some silent timeout issues going on, because having my setup with one hdri for each (reflection, specular, reflection for windows, background, and light) makes it take some time loading them in before the render starts. But I should have gotten an error in that case, and after all they aren't that big.

My only real lead right now is if any different plugin versions are making all buckets from that node to calculate wrong. I could double check it (again)...