Forcing DR nodes

[White Wizard]

I've discovered that I can be tremendously more productive with my renders by running Vray Adv CPU renders through BB while simultaneously running Vray RT GPU renders locally. Since the RT renders are working primarily off the GPU it doesn't seem to affect my BB renders much, if at all.

I want to take this a step further by having my RT GPU render utilize DR, and I have all the typical settings to enable that, however the other node never gets loaded in the VRay messages window.

Is it possible to force DR to kick in even though VRspawner probably sees that node as "busy"?

[yavor.rubenov]

Hello,

For RT GPU DR rendering you would need to start the RT Render server on the nodes. It should be available in the Chaos Group > V-Ray RT Adv for 3ds Max program group.
The RT Render server can run together with the ADV DR render as they are on different ports.


Best regards,
Yavor

[White Wizard]

Hello,

For RT GPU DR rendering you would need to start the RT Render server on the nodes. It should be available in the Chaos Group > V-Ray RT Adv for 3ds Max program group.
The RT Render server can run together with the ADV DR render as they are on different ports.


Best regards,
Yavor

I have it all set up but it always says that RT could not connect because it timed out. I haven't had any issues in the production bucket renderer with DR.

[yavor.rubenov]

Is it possible that your firewall blocks port 20206 (the one used for RT) but is allowing port 20204(the one used in production) ?

[White Wizard]

Is it possible that your firewall blocks port 20206 (the one used for RT) but is allowing port 20204(the one used in production) ?

I have my firewall set to allow any in/out connection for 3dsmax and vrlservice and both vrspawners on both systems. Is there a different process I might be missing?

[yavor.rubenov]

Yes - you need the vray.exe for RT DR rendering on the DR nodes.

[White Wizard]

Yes - you need the vray.exe for RT DR rendering on the DR nodes.

Apparently Windows Firewall was blocking it (I use Comodo). So I added all the necessary rules there as well and now it's working. Sorry to have bothered you and thanks for the assistance.

[White Wizard]

A new problem directly related to this:

For certain reasons it works best for my setup to push this scene to a backburner job on one of my nodes but not my workstation. The issue I'm having is that the scene won't utilize my workstation gpu for DR within this backburner job. I searched through the log file on my node for any mention of DR trying to start but couldn't find anything. Nothing about "timed out" either. I was careful to set the DR servers in my scene before submitting as well. I checked my workstation node, unchecked the node I'm submitting to, and checked Use localhost. Theoretically the scene should load on my render node via backburner, render on localhost and on the workstation node. The logs seem to suggest DR isn't even trying to run.

The documentation is hinting that I need to run a backburner job on my node before vrayspawner can start working. However, it's way past the 3dsmax 30 day trial so I don't believe I am able to. Unless there is a commandline method?

[yavor.rubenov]

Hm could you try the same scenario with the Adv render? For it to work I think you need to set the "Save servers in the scene" option in the DR settings dialog. If that works and the node picks up the workstation - then your backburner is set up correctly.

For the V-Ray RT case it is a bit more complicated as there is no "Save servers in the scene" option (I'll add a note about that in our system). The simple way would be to start Max on the node and configure the servers there. But as you said your trial is over so you can't start Max. The settings themselves are saved in a .cfg file that you can easily copy from the workstation to the nodes. It is located in "C:\Users\Your user name\AppData\Local\Autodesk\3dsMax\2017 - 64bit\ENU\en-US\plugcfg\vrayrt_dr.cfg". From the workstation start Max,open the RT DR settings and add the workstation IP as a DR server. Then copy the vrayrt_dr.cfg to the node machine and try V-Ray RT DR through backburner again.