Smoke rendering pitch black in lit scene

[japetus]

So I was following along in the static cloud tutorial and doing some renders last night. My cloud was rendering normally as it should and then I submitted a very high sim to the farm to simulate over night. When I came back this morning my sim was finished and looked great in the viewport except now it is rendering pitch black in my scene when last night, with a larger voxel size, it was rendering correctly as a white cloud. As far as I know the only thing that changed from last night to this morning was my voxel size of my grid. Maybe I'm having a brain fart, but I can't figure out why this has happened... I've tried messing with the smoke opacity to no effect. Any ideas?? I've attached a screenshot so you can see the effect and how it should look based on my GPU preview...
Phoenix 3.14.01 Nightly, Vray 3.70.01 , 3ds max 2020.1

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hmm, are there any errors or warnings in the Phoenix log?

[japetus]

This one? "C:\PhoenixFD\PhoenixFD 3ds Max 2020.log" It seems unusually long with the same frame repeated again and gain, but i've never looked in the log before. I can zip it and attach it if you want

[japetus]

The version on the farm had 3.14.00 installed and i'm slightly newer at 3.14.01, so I updated to the same, maybe that will help...
Update: no effect

[japetus]

Some more experimentation, I deleted and loaded a new phoenix grid and made my sim the input, still black. I deleted my camera and removed exposure control in my scene, still black. I loaded my sim into a VRayVolumeGrid and it renders as it should! So that's something....

[Ivaylo Katev]

i have memories that scanline version used with vray produyces black result when the background is the environment, may be there are already warnings and this is not the case, but just to mention it, who knows

[georgi.zhekov]

What if you make a new scene from scratch, import the cache in a new Phoenix simulator and add a dome light? If it it's still black, send over the files and we'll take a look.

Thanks,

[japetus]

soooo the plot thickens! If I load the same scene on another machine, it renders correctly, if I load the scene on my machine which I built it on, it now renders dark GRAY (not black). If i load the same scene again (using Open Recent) and render again, it renders dark gray with black shadows.Very weird to get different render results on the same machine on same frame. Georgi, I tried your method on post 7, which seems to work. I discovered that this other machine has 3.14.00 installed and mine is 3.14.01. I installed 3.14.01 on the other machine and now the cloud renders black there too, so it must be something with 3.14.01. I'm suspecting it's something with physical camera/exposure settings...here's the scene! I'll see if another nightly build works better than the version I have going right now.

[georgi.zhekov]

Ah, thanks - it happens only in the nightlies when using Phoenix for V-Ray 3. This should be fixed soon. Until then you can use the official builds or to try and pick an older nightly build.

Cheers,