Black buckets appearing when using Distributed Rendering

[David_Murgatroyd]

I have been trying to get Distributed Rendering to work, but it seems that every time the remote server renders black buckets, while the client machine renders the buckets as normal.

I have tried this on a simple scene with no textures and only one omni light. The same problem occurs whether or or I use a precalculated IR map.

Has anyone else had this problem, and are there any solutions?[/img]

[paulison]

I wonder if this problem could be due to the path used to save the irradiance map?

I read somewhere people resolving this kind of thing by mapping to a drive letter, the location of the irradiance map on the network and using this...or was it like this kind of format...

//server/irradiancemaps/IRmap.vrmap

my windows machines sometimes have trouble refreshing network shares so this latter format could be the answer

[David_Murgatroyd]

I've tried that already, without result. Are you having the same problem? I'm running WindowsXP SP2 with dynamically assigned IP addresses. The VRay log file contains no error messages, which is why this is so frustrating.

[paulison]

Sorry im not really using DR for real work at the moment as I had to give everyones borrowed machine back :P I only had a similar problem when testing where all buckets rendered black because the renderslave did not have the same drive letter assigned to the share on the network that stores the irradiance map. Doesnt sound like this is your problem though...

I wonder if the dynamic IP is the problem? I doubt it, but do the IP's of each machine stay the same throughout the course of the rendering? I know ours here get their IP from the DHCP server which gives each machine a lease on a specific IP for a specified amount of time (seems to be a long time).

What about your networking in general? is everything running smoothly? Im guessing that anything from a dodgy network cable to an overloaded hub (as opposed to switch) could be the cause. It sounds more like a networking thing than a vray bug to be honest but I could be totally wrong!! Just tossing some ideas at ya to look into.

oh yeah, one last thing.... disable the firewall in SP2. MANY people have this enabled without problems but we have problems running our archicad licence server in that it refuses to work with the windows firewall enabled on that machine. (so could be worth a try - even though my example is from different software)

OH! another thing....make sure the slave has exactly the same plugins...eg greeble. If you use greeble and use DR, the slaves without the plugin will not render the geometry. This is probably an obvious thing, but you never know (check through all plugins). Save vray version??

[David_Murgatroyd]

Yeah, I can't rule out network problems, but it seems a bit strange because backburner works perfectly well. I tried turning off SP2 firewall, but no success.

Thanks for your other ideas, i'll keep looking into them!