inconsistent results on render farm

[johnszot]

phoenix people!

first post to this forum - loving phoenix so far, but we're having some issues getting consistent results across a render farm:

https://vimeo.com/87469830
password: dusttest

seems the lighting jumps back and forth between two set-ups, but not really sure what's causing it. a single node will render two frames inconsistently, so it doesn't seem to be a node-based issue. we're using vray 2.3 with the most recent build of phoenix on Max 2013. not the most up-to-date pipeline, but....

thoughts? insight?

thanks in advance

john

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey, what light sources and shadows do you use? I have seen this effect with an omni light that's rendered with V-ray, but does not use VRayShadow.

[johnszot]

svetlin -

the scene's lit wth vray sun and vray area light.....although I'm still checking to see if we have a file consistency issue, we believe it's a rendering issue....

J

[Paul Oblomov]

Had exact the same

But I felt ignored

[johnszot]

well, got more results back from the farm - can't explain this as anything other than a rendering consistency issue - the same node will render the scene is two different ways with no apparent pattern to the problem.

so Paul, i don't *think* we're crazy, but....

any more thoughts from the chaos group crew?

[Ivaylo Katev]

can you make a test with light cache off? i know it's slow but just few frames.
the usual DR inconsistency looks like buckets, but here the looks like the entire lighting is broken. can you tell us is it deterministic (i.e. each frame renders the same as in the video) or the result changes each time?

[Paul Oblomov]

I had this flicker per bucket, without any lightcache.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Pavel, when you had this or similar issue, was it with an older v-ray, or does it happen with 3.0?

If any of you guys can strip down a scene and send it to us, it would be best - I could not reproduce it with a simple setup with an area light and vray sun, so must be some specific setting that you guys used.

[Paul Oblomov]

Well, it was vray 2.45. One of the beta. I ended up rendering everything on single machine. As I remember, I used some of the combination of grid based lighting and maybe plaing lights. Don't remember, project is on archive already