Vray DR issue on Max 2010 - spawners running but not rendering

[PHearn]

First post, so firstly hi all!

 

I should point out that I'm not a 3D artist, I provide tech support in the animation studio but I've not a lot of experience using Vray/Max. Hopefully I'll give you all the right info but there's a good chance I'll leave out something vital/tell you things you don't need to know

 

Setup:

We have a number of (hp xw6400) workstations hooked up to render farm of around 30 machines (hp proliant ). All machines dual-boot Win XP 32/64bit. We use 64-bit day-to-day, 32 is left there just in case. We mainly use Max 2010 64bit. We used to use Backburner for network rendering but now use Deadline 4. Normal network rendering through Deadline is working fine.

 

One artist is currently doing some single frame renders and so is using Vray DR to speed up his workflow. He's done this on the system often before and has at least once experienced the problem I will describe (previous 'solution' below)

 

Problem:

The problem we're experiencing is that all of a sudden our render machines aren't joining in the DR. They're all running the vrayspawner ok. This has worked before since we moved to Deadline, so it doesn't seem to be related to that.

 

I can reproduce the problem on a different machine with a new scene full of teapots and lights (the extent of my 3d talents).

 

I've tried selecting render nodes individually, in small groups, as a whole. A couple of the render machines are currently working, but that's not with me consciously changing anything. Whenever I've tried anything (soft-reset, hard-reset, restart-vray, kill deadline etc.) I've always made sure to do it on multiple machines, but the result has been inconsistent. All machines (should be) set up identically, running on identical hardware.

 

I've seen it mentioned elsewhere that you need to run a Backburner job as slave before launching the vrayspawner. Is that necessarily a Backburner job or would running a job as slave through deadline achieve the same effect? (also, why does this have to happen). Jobs are being pushed to the machines fairly regularly and I've restarted vrayspawner, so they should have launched Max and done a render since their last reboot.

 

'Solution?':

Before my time here this problem happened at least once before. After banging her head against a brick wall (metaphorically, I assume) my predecessor managed to get machines working after doing a hard power-off and rebooting. I've of course given this a go, but it hasn't helped. Apparently it may have occurred before after the machines restarted after Automatic updates.

 

Right, long first post. I'll leave it there so you can ask me if you need more info. Hopefully someone can help me and I haven't given you too many red herrings.

[Matt McDonald]

Are you running the spawner application or the service? If its the service it has to be run as a user account that has both local admin rights and access to all of the network drives that maps, etc might be pulled from.

 

Same thing really, if the machines are running as a user who does not have local admin or access to the network drives.

[mfured20]

I run Max 2010 on Win7 64 bit across four slaves and a workstation. I have had very few problems running DR across the system while rendering. I HAVE had issues with some slaves dropping in and out in the Irradiance Map prepass, but they almost always show up for the final render. There are sometimes some delays also, where the host machine's set of buckets can be 15% done or more with the rendering before the other machines have finally loaded the scene and decided to join, but they always do eventually.

 

About the only thing I can suggest is to let a DRed rendering start and see if they join up down the road. Sorry I can't be of more help.

[PHearn]

Thanks for the replies. Sorry, I think my notifications got caught in spam, hence my delay responding.

 

Elevation: All the machines are running the spawner with full admin rights.

 

This problem has come up at 'random' after the machines had been working fine with the same setup. They have received windows updates recently and been restarted, so I'm suspicious that it's either an issue with one of the updates, or something not being done after the machine restarts.