Help! big problem and short deadline

[Morbid Angel]

I havent read through all of the post. However I will say that this is not the displacement indeed. It looks like one or, some machines on the farm are not loading a texture or an object or something. Since the surface of the water stays consistent throughout, and rather something else offscreen pops on and off.
I suggest to make a step back. Render a test animation with a vrayMtl grey override, to see if it is the geometry/displacement first. If its not, then turn off the displacement and render the animation with the water shader and all objects. See if something is poping on and off.
Hope that helps.

[alfabeta]

Hi... Have done some tests. In the first column you see two frames rendered by the renderfarm. Frame 4186 represent the "look" of the sea and frame 4187 is the frame that "flicks" and is again followed by a frame that looks similar to 4186. The frame that flicks on the renderfarm (4187) is actually the "correct" result as shown on my workstation (see "My workstation").

* When this frames is rendered on my workstation they both look correct.
* Rendered with a grey vray material the displacement is the same so it is definitively not the displacement that is the problem.
* There are no objects in the scene that flicks on/off and thereby affects the reflections/light on the sea as "Morbid Angel" suggested (see "overview")

Possible problems?:
* I get a "Scene bounding box is too large, possible raycast errors" (the sea surface is quite large. It the seasurface plane too big? (1000 meters)
* That the scene is in millimetre?

[alfabeta]

It seems like QMC in the first bounce fix the problem...

[Morbid Angel]

holdon...yes ofcourse! since you are using displaced animation, irradience map wont cut it. Though I dont know if the artifacting is what the irmap should have done, but usually if objects are deforming/moving frame to fram irmap is outof the question.

[alfabeta]

But why dont we have this problem when we render on one machine then? Does different machines calculate different? Just curious...

[Morbid Angel]

do not know...

[DaForce]

The bounding box problem could well be causing it.. Try scaling that sucker down and see if it helps.

Do you know if its one specific machine that is messing the frames up? You should be able to tell in the BB queue manager??

[alfabeta]

Hi DaForce, the frame flicking is random... thats the thing that makes this quite a mystery. What makes even stranger is that it can be stable for several 100 frames, but when it first starts it escalates...

[DaForce]

very strange indeed.

Have you tried scaling the scene down yet?