Vray Camera doesn't work with Distributed Rendering

[danb4026]

I cannot get a rendering to come out right when using a vray physical cameran and DR. The exposures are different on the buckets from the host than the buckets from the slaves. The slave machines buckets are darker.

 

When I render with a standard max camera, it is fine.

 

I can't find anywhere that is says that the vray camera won't work with DR. Am I missing something?

[Craig Ramsay]

Do you have the same version of V-ray installed on all your machines? That would be the first thing to double check.

[schnitz]

If your using a hdri or background map to light the scene make sure it's on a shared drive that all machines can access. It could be that your render nodes are not getting access to the map needed to light the scene.

Also if distributed rendering is still giving you trouble try using split rendering though backburner.

[Eric Sosa]

hey again Daniel,

 

I render with vray physicalcam & DR all the time and never seen or heard about having problems with different "exposures" from slaves or head sender....but I experience, kind of often, that the slaves buckets do not match the "glosiness" mats either in reflection or refraction and the slaves buckets with problem look simple much lighter then the main sender buckets.

 

The only way to avoid it is by "refresing" the "resolve servers" in the distributed rendering settings. I ALWAYS do this precedure JUST before pressing RENDER.

 

hope it helps.

Edited November 25, 2008 by Eric Sosa

[Thablanch]

In some older versions, there was some saving issue in DR

Turn off incremental save in Max preferences..

Do a saveas of the scene, different name..

Shoot it again.

Now DR should reload the good scene, so if a change to lights or material was made, it will follow in the new image

[danb4026]

Guys, thanks for the replies. All of the machines have Vray 1.50 SP2.

 

Hypothetically speaking, if one of the machines had 1.50 SP2 "Demo" on it, could that be a cause of this kind of problem, even if the versions and SP were the same?

[Tommy L]

I spent a long time trying to resolve this issue. Goes without saying everything shoul;d be UNC. Some things help temporarily, like the measures mentioned. Also, refreshing the Asset Tracker sometimes helps.

 

All I know for sure is that when I finished building a new network and I started using shared drives instead of network drives the problem stopped.

[danb4026]

Tommy, when you set up your new network and started using shared drives, rather than networked drives, how did you go about doing it? ie:

 

What kind of drives did you buy? Were they external drives? How were they connected?

 

I was thinking about getting an external shared drive and having my 3 computers access that, but wasn't sure what to get and what the proper way to install was.

 

Any insights to share?

[Tommy L]

Shared folders or mapped network drives? This is not a hardware choice, its how windows network is set up. I would suggest you either do some reading or get a savvy friend / professional to hep you when you decide to expand.

 

This isnt meant to sound like a put-down, windows networking is difficult. My last network looked a lot neater and tidier than my current one, but this one works alot better. If I uninstalled this one and tried to reinstall it, I am sure it would be a total different configuration again. I only half-know what I'm doing and everything takes three times as long to set up as it should.

Edited November 26, 2008 by Tommy L

[Eric Sosa]

daniel...install the SAME vray in all pc's and refresh your DR settings before pressing the reder button... it will work, I'm shure

[danb4026]

I mostly use Light Cache and Irradiance Map, so:

 

I installed a program that automatically copies files from my host to my slaves. This helps ensure that the light cache and irradiance map files are the same on each machine.

 

I changed my DR settings so that my computers are not all sharing drives.

I created the same paths on each machine individually and the user paths on each machine are identical. So when the host machine goes to "c:/project folder/sceneassets/renderassets" to find find my lighting files, all of the machines go to their respective (exactly the same) path to access the same (copied) lighting files.

 

Rendering is now not only way faster, but works. Hope this makes sense.

[Tommy L]

Dan,

Happy to hear you got it sorted. I think the way you are working is probably the best for your current workflow. However, if you ever decide to expand the way you work, ie more people on the network, I would consider keeping all your assets on a server.