Distributet Rendering... how to do reliable and keep it working everytime?

[caypiranha]

In the End, I am giving it up now using distributed rendering. And when I talk to other guys, they agree in some cases. Once I got anfteran hour or so to work, next Days it lost it´s workability... no responding from the Clients, or strange Luminance values in the Buckets. Even if every texture Assets are conncted, it always surprises every 2 attemp. (so it might work for an afternoon, but next day, it´s over.

Does Chaosgroup offer somewhere a good, and for Artists understandable Guide how to set up a propper and good working Disstrubive rendering with no further question after at all? I might miss an Important point, wich, once found, might help. But in Jobtimes ( as always) you can forget reseaching over researching.
It´s otherwise time and money wasting. And the question is coming up, why to pay so much money for Vray Next (see, still using 3.6) and anger around with such things by loosing all my 5 rendernodes , because I can not afford a full upgrade for all the rendernodes - therefore, I might buy already another full license!

the system base here in my office is indeed so simple: No firewall and simple on a switch connected PC´s

thanks in advance & best regards!

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Have you already checked DR page in Docs?
https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...uted+Rendering

I'll try to write a troubleshooting guide about Distributed Rendering but meanwhile you may share with us what kind of issues you are facing in more details so we could debug them.

[glorybound]

It is a hit/miss for me, too. Most of the time it works, but then all of a sudden I get black buckets. My last few jobs I had to jump ship on it, which cost me time.

[electricart]

In case it helps anyone, we have found a couple of things that help with distributed rendering;

• If running multiple spawners at once for different versions of Max, you must load each spawner with a different port and temp directory
• We have had times before when experiencing black buckets / differring luminance values for certain buckets e.t.c., we rebooted all the nodes, only to find that rebooting the workstation that was starting the distributed render was actually the fix (this was often the last thing we thought would be the problem)
• Scenes with high memory usage at render time (e.g. displacement) may affect nodes with less RAM but not other nodes. If nodes have been online for a long time, memory leaks in various programs may have consumed enough free RAM to stop that node from properly rendering
• Set V-Ray image sampler 'Min subdivs' to at least 2 (not sure why we have this listed in our troubleshooting notes, I think it was something suggested in this forum a long time ago, may no longer be relevant)

We have a seperate user account specifically for rendering, and we have scripts set up to clear all %TEMP% files for the render user on startup, and to delete all user Max folders (so as to set Max to defaults every time and clear caches).

We still find we occasionally have problems with distributed rendering, and more often than not, rebooting the workstation (rather than the nodes) or a problematic scene is actually the cause. Problematic scenes are sometimes fixed by creating a new scene in Max and importing or copying across the scene data. We have definitely seen distributed rendering problems with certain specific scenes. To diagnose this, we have a relatively basic test scene that we can use to test distributed rendering - if it works fine, then it is likely the problem is scene specific.

Hope this helps.

Tristan.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Thank you very much for the suggestions, they are definitely very helpful.
We are working on a Distributed Rendering Troubleshooting guide right now, it's almost done so we should publish it very soon.
Meanwhile do you guys think if it would be helpful if we create and support Troubleshooting page somewhere in the Docs where you can read guides about the most common issues along suggestion how to debug and resolve them?

[themaxxer]

I have also read to start and submit one backburner render job to get distributed rendering to work... I don't where I have read it, but I had some problems with my new workstation and this helped me...
I have 12 renderslaves and some workstations and had no issues with distributed rendering since years now. it is very stable and reliable...
important use always the same versions on all slaves! network has to run clean and all renderslaves have to "see" all the other computers... map all drives to the same letters on all machines... so I have M:\ for all textures and assets on all machines...
hope you get it to work.

best regards
themaxxer

[Leeds3D]

same odd issue with darker areas from distributed rendered boxes here. Often absolutely nothing changes from finishing a render with a render working correctly and hitting render again for some, but not all of our render stations not render correctly.

[caypiranha]

Thanks for all these comments. It´s interesting / good to know, that - why on earth ever - the DR is working fine for someone, and others are also fighting with issues.
I Think, it´s up to Chaos Group to get a way - an childeasy way - to make DR much more reliable and increase it´s usability.
So that it does not need an Administrator to write Scripts or so. Artistfreindly means, that he will manga it by his own.

I am having absolute pahtes, mapped networkpathes anyway and only one version of vray spawner is started.
I was having one time an delighted moment, when I turned of the Vray spawner and just turned ont as an Service - it was working fine then ( wich some time before never did, so I never tried it again - where is it in the Docs)

Apropos Services: please, please tell about what you thought about while Implementing the vrayspaner.exe, wich I added to the Autostart versus the other way of starting it just over the Service.
I found , that both together they don´t work.

(And while talking about explanation: The Vray Docs are fine well -so far - they help. But an issue a lots of Softwaredeveloper is having is, that there are not from time to time just a view Pictures that tell how, in wichconjuction and with what it only works, or is needed.

thanks in advance & beste regards.