Vray spawner as a service renders with grey materials

[Alex_M]

I wanted to register Vray spawner as a service on my render slave, so I went to Start Menu > Vray Next for 3ds Max 2020 > Register as a service the V-ray spawner for 3ds Max 2020 (run as administrator). It asked me for user and password which I typed in. So far so good. I then started a render on one of the workstations using that machine as a render slave. It joined the rendering process, but it rendered everything with grey materials. Why is that and how do I fix it?

[hermit.crab]

Is the texture's source location on a shared server? Or have you checked the "Transfer missing assets" option in the Distributed Rendering menu?

[Alex_M]

The assets are on a mapped network drive. The physical drive resides in one of the workstations that is also used for rendering. No, I haven't checked the "transfer missing assets" option. Is enabling this mandatory when using Vray Spawner as a service?

And another question. Can I use two Vray Spawners simultaneously in case I want to render with both Vray Next and Vray 5 beta with that render slave (not at the same time of course)? The render slave is unattended most of the time so I don't want to always manually remote desktop to it to start/stop spawners depending on the version of Vray I want to render with. Ideally, I want to just hit render and the slave to decide which spawner to use.

[hermit.crab]

Check if the "transfer missing assets" option makes a difference. Otherwise, does it happen in a particular scene? Could you send it to support@chaosgroup.com so we can take a look?
You can have two VRaySpawners running simultaneously with different versions of the host platform. For example, 3ds max 2020 will have V-Ray NEXT installed on both the slave and the workstation, whilst 3ds Max 2021 has V-Ray 5 installed. Activate both VRaySpawner versions and send jobs through the respective 3ds Max/V-Ray version.

[ivan.slavchev]

The assets are on a mapped network drive. The physical drive resides in one of the workstations that is also used for rendering. No, I haven't checked the "transfer missing assets" option. Is enabling this mandatory when using Vray Spawner as a service?

By default, the spawner is registered with a "Local system account". This means that the account has no permissions to access network shares, hence the gray images. You should change the service's user with one that as such permissions - e.g. the user you're logging in with into Windows. See the following article for more information. Alternatively, you can run the render server manually, but that's not so convenient in most cases.

The "Transfer missing assets" option will do too, but it's slower compared to accessing the assets directly from the share. See https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...deringSettings

And another question. Can I use two Vray Spawners simultaneously in case I want to render with both Vray Next and Vray 5 beta with that render slave (not at the same time of course)? The render slave is unattended most of the time so I don't want to always manually remote desktop to it to start/stop spawners depending on the version of Vray I want to render with. Ideally, I want to just hit render and the slave to decide which spawner to use.

That can be done, but you must have the spawners running on different ports. Otherwise, the processes will start fighting over the default port - 20204 for CPU spawners / 20206 for the GPU ones and you'll have problems rendering with either version.

E.g. - if you use V-Ray for 3dsMax 2020 and 3dsMax 2021.

- for 2020 register it on the default port 20204 -> Start Menu\Programs\V-Ray 5 for 3ds Max 2020\Distributed rendering\Register as a service the V-Ray spawner for 3ds Max 2020"

same thing command - line

"C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2020\vrayspawner2020.exe" -service

- for 2021 use a different port, e.g. TCP 20209. This should be done command line - run CMD as administrator paste the command below and hit "Enter"

sc create "VRaySpawner 2021_20209" DisplayName="VRaySpawner 2021_20209" binPath="C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2021\vrayspawner2021.exe -port=20209"

After that - in DR settings - for 3dsMax 2021 change the default port 20204 to 20209 before submitting a job.