vray 3.3 - some computers on the farm will output solid colour frames

[mrhalaby]

we've been testing 3.3 and we are having a couple of issues that might have an easy solution:

Scenes sent from 3.3:
- Locally, computers render fine, but on the farm a few (about 5%) computers produce completely solid frames, either black, white, yellow, some pink variation... alpha is also solid, and it shouldn't be. Re installing vray didn't seem to help.

- Some infinite / NaN pixels have appeared in the renders, but this might be from not reseting the config to a default one.

- In 3.2 scenes where we had named a render element to Vray_AO now the render element appears as VrayExtratex_AO (not 100% sure of this but 99%)

[vlado]

For the first issue, do you have lens effects in the V-Ray VFB enabled?

For the NaN pixels, I will need some example scene to check what's going on.

For the render element issue, what would be the steps to reproduce it?

Best regards,
Vlado

[mrhalaby]

Hi,

- no lens effects applied, and apparently in some cases this is fixed by re installing vray, although not in all the render nodes. Still trying to figure out why sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

- The NaN pixels are in the vray shadows pass, we will try to reproduce it on a more simple scene.

- About the render element, sorry I got it wrong. The actual issue is that previously output names were:

03_0040_v001_.RGB_color.1001.exr

03_0040_v001_.VRayExtraTex_AO_.1001

03_0040_v001_.VRay_UV_.1001.exr

And now they are:

04_0020_v001_.RGB_color.1001.exr

04_0020_v001_.VRayExtraTex_AO.1001

04_0020_v001_.VRay_UV_.1001.exr

*ignore that they are different shot numbers

There used to be an extra underscore "_" in all the passes, except for the RGB, and now it is still in all the passes, except for the AO pass. It was an easy fix but just in case it's happening to more people...

Also we are creating an extra render pass in the custom render submission script, which hasn't changed, and this happens:



The bottom one is how the output used to be named, and now the files come with the filename like the top one

[vlado]

- no lens effects applied, and apparently in some cases this is fixed by re installing vray, although not in all the render nodes. Still trying to figure out why sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Do you keep the V-Ray log files around? I would be interested to look at the vraylog.txt file from a wrong frame.

- The NaN pixels are in the vray shadows pass, we will try to reproduce it on a more simple scene.

Thanks! This will be helpful.

There used to be an extra underscore "_" in all the passes, except for the RGB, and now it is still in all the passes, except for the AO pass. It was an easy fix but just in case it's happening to more people...

Will try to reproduce this here.

Best regards,
Vlado

[mrhalaby]

a small update

the naming problem in the passes only happens when a scene that was sent to the farm with vray 3.2 is processed on a 3.3 machine. If the render is sent from a 3.3 machine, everything works as it usually did.

[vlado]

[QUOTE=mrhalaby;677124the naming problem in the passes only happens when a scene that was sent to the farm with vray 3.2 is processed on a 3.3 machine. If the render is sent from a 3.3 machine, everything works as it usually did.[/QUOTE]I think we reproduced the issue here and we are looking into it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[mrhalaby]

One computer on the farm hadn't been updated to 3.3, therefore it was writing the files with the old names, but looking at the RGB pass I noticed how different the shadows for objects with opacity maps look.

It seems like 3.3 is ignoring the opacity map for the shadows, while the 3.2 computer was doing them perfectly:

[vlado]

Hm, I will need a scene for this - works fine on my end. What kind of material is it?

Best regards,
Vlado

[mrhalaby]

It's a vrayblendMtl with a mask, can I email you a simplified version of the scene?

[vlado]

It's a vrayblendMtl with a mask, can I email you a simplified version of the scene?

Yes, it will be very helpful! If you can get this to me tonight, we will be able to roll the fix into the next patch in a couple of days. You can email it to vlado@chaosgroup.com

Best regards,
Vlado

[mrhalaby]

already sent, cheers!

[vlado]

Thanks, it's fixed for the next nightly/stable builds and the fix will go into the next official update in a couple of days. If you need the fix sooner, please email to vlado@chaosgroup.com

Best regards,
Vlado

[mrhalaby]

I can confirm now that the black/solid colour frames are due to a bad installation. We use this batch file to deploy the installation on the farm, but sometimes we have to execute it manually a couple of times on the machines for it to install correctly.

"
CALL copy "\\{our_network_path}\vray_adv_33003_max2014_x64.e xe" "C:\"
CALL "C:\vray_adv_33003_max2014_x64.exe" -gui=0 -configFile="\\{our_network_path}\rendersettings.xm l " -quiet=1

"

Edit: the text coding creates an empty space in the .exe and in the .xml extensions when I post it here, but they are correct on our batch file.

[Morbid Angel]

you don't actually have to copy the installer to local machine, it can run from network.

[mrhalaby]

thanks, I know, but I usually try to install files locally to avoid uncompressing over the network. It shouldn´t make any difference for the installation though. It is a bit more about the flags than about copying it to local.