DR worked perfectly in 2010 but not working with 2011 SP5

[cgrant3d]

I've been having a lot of trouble getting DR with 2011 / SP5 to work. In an effort to track down the troubles I have a relatively simple interior scene that renders fine with 2010 but doesn't start up on the DR nodes with 2011.

Any suggestions?

Here are the VRay / spawner logs for one of the DR nodes that failed to start. I'm not sure why but I wasn't able to attach the logs as txt files or as a zip file so here's a temporary link... http://www.christophergrant.com/files/vrlogs.zip

[vlado]

Did you run a backburner job with 3ds Max 2011 and with the server machines as backburner render slaves? It looks like backburner needs to initialize some stuff before DR can work.

Best regards,
Vlado

[cgrant3d]

For this test I'm not using backburner - just DR.

...

And as luck will have it - now it's working... Will keep looking at it today....

[cgrant3d]

I'm continuing to dig into this problem and what I'm finding is there is some sort of camera corruption going on. The solution is to duplicate the camera and render from the new one.

For example - I just opened a project that I've been working on the past week. It never worked with DR but it was my 2011 test project so I just chalked it up to some unforseen issue. Now if I open that file and render it's black. BUT. If I duplicate the camera, then render from the new camera everything works perfectly. So - what's happening to the cameras that they get "corrupt"?

[cgrant3d]

I've spent the afternoon ripping apart a file that refuses to DR. I've stripped off all materials and what I'm left with is 5 objects that when xref'd into the master file render as black on the DR nodes.

If you have a second can you open up the attached zip and try to render from the "masterScene" file? When I do it I get black buckets from the DR nodes and proper buckets from the workstation.

[EDIT] I've included scene files for 2010 and 2011. I'm getting black buckets here using 2010+SP4a and 2011+SP5

Thanks!