Render Node Error

[GeneCrucean]

Anyone know why Vray would give me errors on a render node but not on my workstation?

The error is "an unhandled exception has occured in the network renderer and it is terminating"

It launches on the nodes and after it goes through some displacement calculations it crashes. I'll try and look at the very last one that shows up before it crashes and post it.

I think I've narrowed it down to a vray displacement mod on one of my characters because if I disable the mod it renders fine. If I turn it on it crashes. Instant exit style. I also tried deleting the mod and reapplying it but that didn't work. I tried setting it to 2d mapping... same error.

The displacement map is a 4k x 4k 16bit grayscale tif but I also tried downsampling it to 2k and 16 bit RGB. Same error though.

*mumbles to self* I thought I shed that blasted rendermonkey23 name a long time ago lol

Here's something that weirds out the situation a little more.

If I hide everything but the character in question and render, it works fine. If I unhide everything it crashes.

[GeneCrucean]

Another thing I just noticed is that if I have more than 1 object that uses displacements in the scene when I submit the render it crashes. BUT... that only applies when I have my character as one of the objects. If I have 2 objects besides that character (both using disp) in the scene it works.

This is getting stranger by the minute.

[J_Bug]

No answer for you but what versin of VRay?

--Jon

[GeneCrucean]

09n

Which brings me to another issue about WHY can't edu versions get access to the beta of 1.5? We don't even have access to newer versions of 09... r would even be nice. Laaaame.

[alkis]

i had similar problems in the past
you need to check the memory on the render nodes that are crashing
if you are using displacement with such a hi res map it s gonna need a lot of ram to do the calulation
if the nodes have less than 512 (sometimes they need at least a gig) then they ll definetely crash
the reason that it renders fine on its own is probably because it needs less memory with everything else hidden.
there is a slight chance that it might be a backburner problem
so its worth deleting all the job files in the backburner folder and delete the backburner.xml as well and restart the machine.
hope this helps
alkis

[GeneCrucean]

Thanks for the input alkis. I forgot to dup my cgtalk post here so here it is.

Workstation:
3.06ghz P4 1gb mem
Render Nodes:
Dual 3.06ghz Xeon 2gb - 4gb mem

All our machines have the same setup too, workstations and nodes. The way we run our plugins is from a shared folder on the network that all the render farm machines and workstations point to. That way we all have the same plugs installed and it's 1 folder to update with new ones.

What makes this so weird is that it renders fine with everything visible on my machine but not the render boxes.

The backburner stuff you mentioned is interesting. I'll look into that.

[GeneCrucean]

Well I want to say thanks to the vray boys.

The new beta of vray fixed this problem. I honestly have no idea why it was doing that. I was to the point of trying every little thing and tweaking non related values even tho I knew they weren't going to fix it because I was so flustered. Oh well...