network rendered animation

[reyner]

Hello, here goes a silly question..

I was trying to render an animation across multiple computers and it didn't work. I did the following:

I rendered the same scene (every 10 frames) in three diferent computers only to get one vrmap to use later:
in computer A----rendered frames from 0-299 to obtain vrmap 1
in computer B----rendered frames from 300-599 to obtain vrmap 2
in computer C----rendered frames from 600-900 to obtain vrmap 3

then I merged the 3 vrmap using the vrmap viewer

Now, when I send the final animation to be network rendered using the vrmap already created, for some reason the computers are not picking the vrmap.
All I get is are black images without any lights in it. Do you know why this may happen? Or is not possible to render the way I was trying to do?

[RErender]

What version are you using? earlier versions could have problems if more than one machine tried to access the imap at the same time.

Are the imap folders visible to the farm machines? Try loading the imaps by browsing through "my network places" this insures a UNC path and generally works better over a network.

Also you might want to use V-Ray irradiance map viewer to merge the three imaps together to avoid any differences between the three parts of the animation.

[reyner]

Hi RErender

Using max 7 with vray 1.09.03 Our office didn't want to install the latest version until 1.5 is out!

Do you think that is the problem?

and yes, I used the irradiance map viewer to merge the 3 imaps. Also tested in one computer and it works. But when network rendering didn't work, despite loading the final irmap through "my network places " and having it accessible to all 3 machines

[RErender]

Have you tried placing the map locally on the farm boxes? should be in the same directory on all the farm boxes and the modeling machine then just load it locally and send it to the network.