Issue with loading Irradiance maps after precalc

[Matt Sugden]

This problem is driving me nuts!!

 

3ds Max Backburner is throwing up an issue with loading Irradiance maps. I don't have any other issues with textures, models, render output files etc. It's just irradiance maps that are the issue. It's not even consistent, sometimes a PC will see the file and other times it won't. At one point all the machines saw it then it stopped after a few frames.

 

I suspect it's a file permission issue, but why specifically irradiance maps? And how do I fix? As far as I can see every node is seeing all the files.

 

All my files are stored on a NAS, I use UNC for all file paths. I'm not sure what left there is to try. I've read about setting up user accounts. All the render Nodes are setup identical in software and hardware, and they logon as admin with no user password.

 

Strangely, when I rendered a very simple scene, as a test it seemed to work, could there be a conflict shafting the irradiance maps perhaps?

 

Any ideas of things to try would be appreciated as I'm running out of ideas and time!!!!

 

HELP!!!!!!!

[Francisco Penaloza]

Do you have any antivirus in your system??

Also you mentioned your files get stored in to a NAS, is your network fast enough?? how many rendering machines you have??

If all your system load the render files at the same time, your NAS and network gets hit pretty hard, you need a robust system if you have many machines working at the same time.

 

Having said that, If you are in the latest version of V-Ray I would recommend to give a try to Brute force, quality wise is better than interpolated method and has the great advantage that you don't need to pre-calculate and save and load for animations.

 

Best luck.

[Matt Sugden]

I found the issue, here it is for future reference if anyone else discovers this.....

 

It turns out that one of my render nodes had not saved the irradiance maps during precalc (it didn't report this in backburner however), so every 5 frames or so I had a dropped (missing) IR map. I'm not sure why yet. This explains why the issue seemed intermittent, as back burner was trying to use different render nodes to try and complete the erroneous task during the rendering pass. Looking at the folder containing all the IR maps this wasn't immediately obvious at all as there was over 200 of them (minus the missing 20 or so). And I only discovered this by trying to copy all the IR maps locally, which is when I discovered the first missing file, because everything was rendering fine until it hit the first missing IR map. Then Eureka!

 

 

Back-burner was reporting that there was an issue 'loading the map', but it would have been much more useful if it had reported an error that there was 'no map'!! In retrospect it's the same thing, but if the computer is saying it's having difficulty trying to load a map, it suggests there IS a map.

[Francisco Penaloza]

Well Backburner is very simple (nice way to call it dumb) most of the time it will just show random error but not specifics, also your problem was with V Ray so not much development there between Backburner and VRay.

 

Now to my understanding you should not distribute the pre-calculation of the Irradiance pass. The main idea is to have an uniform solution to later distribute in your farm. You should pre-calculate on a single machine, then share that info with the others. That's why the effort on doing Brute force faster so you don't have to deal with all that.