Distributed rendering woes

[jucaro]

Before I installed RPC Content manager on the main workstation and RPC plugins on the slave computers, Vray DR was working fine.

 

But now all the slaves render black mattes. I cant seem to pinpoint the problem either its because of compatibility problems between Vray DR and RPC.

 

Has anyone have had this problem?

[MegaPixel]

First, I'll state the obvious. RPC's are by default - excluded from scene lighting so if you rendered right after placing your RPC's - they'd render flat black. Either add them to your scene lighting or adjust the "mass edit" properties to be 100% self illuminated.

 

But... this probably isn't your issue since you've rendered successfully before on another machine. Do you have the Vray plugin on all your server nodes? You can always fire off a troubleshooting question to Archvision on there site. Are you using Backburner for the animation or rendering locally on each machine?

[jucaro]

This is how it happened...

 

I was rendering locally on my workstation and everything worked fine.

Then I rendered the scene using VRay DR and everything worked as expected.

Then I put some RPCs in the scene and rendered locally (no DR yet) and it rendered as expected.

 

Then I fired up DR and some buckets rendered without the RPCs but the rest of the scene was there and rendered fine, just no RPCs

 

So I went over to the slave stations and installed the RPC plugin that comes with the CD# 2 of MAX7.

 

BAM! all the buckets that renders are black but the background is there. It looks like an alpha channel except that the background is rendered and the rest of the meshes are just black.

 

To try to troubleshoot I switched to Scanline renderer and rendered a teapot and RPCs and rendered via Backburner and it rendered fine as expected.

 

So where should I go? To Archvision or to Chaos?

[Devin Johnston]

Go to archvision and open a technical support and open a new support incident and tell them what the problem is. I'd do the same with Chaos and see which one of them will own up to the problem. Did you just install a new update?

[jonesthesteam]

I think it may be a problem with the maps used with rpc, make sure they are on a shared network drive that all slaves can see, I've had a similar problem with finalrender.

[Devin Johnston]

I've had the same problem with Final Render and just today sent RPC a support incident today, it's with SP2D. From what I've heard Archvision and Cebas are working on the problem but there is not resolution yet. Vray may have the same problem but I don't know.

[MegaPixel]

Win XP SP2 completly hosed the performance of network sharing for RPC's. It would take me like 20 minutes to upload a simple scene with very few RPC's to the Backburner network. Now I copy my RPC libraries and any scenes that use RPC's locally to each render node