VRay 3.4 Swarm Issue Mac SU 2017 pro #2

[Emmet Fox]

Hi,

We are an office using 20 render nodes and 2 official licences.

We are experiencing issues regarding iMacs 'freezing' while rendering using the swarm. Has anyone experienced this?

We suspect the swarm is stealing too much RAM from macs with barely enough to spare.

We have tried dragging back the utilisation slider with a little bit of success however we are still experiencing issues with various workstations complaining of 'freezing up' while rendering on the swarm and needing to be rebooted. As this is a design office this is very very problematic with regards lost progress and office workflow concerns..

Does anyone have any information on how to fix/manage this issue? Even information regarding exactly what is utilised when rendering as a nodes would be helpful, up until recently I thought the nodes only contributed CPU power however through some tests we observed the swarm sapping upto 8gb of ram from some worksations.. could this be right?

All comments welcome..

[Peter.Chaushev]

Hello, Emmet,

Memory usage in V-Ray depends on how big is your scene and the size of the assets used.
Could you please advise what image sampler mode you use - Progressive or non-Progressive (Bucket)?
Additionally, please provide the following information:
1. Basic system specs of the Macs which have trouble rendering.
2. Max memory usage (in MB) of the machine you initiate the render process from and the max usage of one of the Macs.
3. Max memory usage when the same scene is rendered only on one of the Macs without using V-Ray Swarm.

You are not comfortable sharing information directly here on the forum, you can do so by sending me a private forum message or an email at support@chaosgroup.com

Kind regards,
Peter Chaushev

[Emmet Fox]

Hi Peter,

I believe this was bucket however I have observed the issue with progressive also.

Please see spec of machine in question:

With regards the RAM usage the largest I will investigate this a bit further. I suspect the total RAM usage of the swarm may be more than RAM usage of a single workstation without swarm however I will try and get you more detail.

We are now experiencing a few other symtoms that may be related. We are getting darkened buckets on light cache pass and also (completely) black buckets on last pass. With progressive rendering this issue manifests itself with darkened portions in keeping with the square angle of the progressive refresh i.e.

I can post examples of these erratic rendering effects if you are not familiar!

Thanks

Emmet

[Peter.Chaushev]

Hello, Emmet,

We will be very interested to see any data should you spot abnormal memory consumption. Keep us posted!

Regarding the issue with the black buckets, there are several reasons why this may be occuring - failure to access or transfer certain assets, difference in v-ray versions between the local machines and the rendering slaves, etc. We cannot determine the cause without some further info.
Could you please add a "DR Bucket" render element from the V-Ray Setting's Advanced options panel, and then see which machine produces the faulty results.
Then, please send the V-Ray progress log from the machine which initiated the rendering process as well as the V-Ray Swarm log from the render node machine with the black buckets. This vray-swarm.log file is located in your user folder user/.ChaosGroup/vray-swarm/work/vray-swarm

It would be best to send the requested info at support@chaosgroup.com accompanied by a short description of your problem. A screenshot would also be appreciated!

For more info about V-Ray Swarm, go to https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAYCH/V-Ray+Swarm

Kind regards,
Peter Chaushev