Lower Brightness Buckets From DR Server

[ian_veenstra]

Alright so I have tried sooooo many thing to try and solve this issue but I just cannot crack it. Anytime I try to distribute a render to one of my DR nodes, certain buckets in the scene come back darker than they should be. these darker images also only seem to show up on the glass in the scene (I believe it's the reflections layer that's the problem) See image.



Things I've tried/verified already.

1. Host and server are both set to "no exposure control"
2. Gamma and LUT settings are both set to the default 2.2
3. Both PCs region settings match
4. DR is correctly transferring any missing assets
5. Entire scene has had "Bitmap to VrayBitmap" script run
6. Scene has been set to use UNC paths

Has anyone else had this issue? It's driving me insane and I have a huge animation that needs to be rendered so not using DR isn't really an option haha

[3d-laboratory]

In my experience mostly this problem is solved by restarting MAX and Vray Spawner. I often have the suspiction that there remain some data in the RAM from previous working states which were reused on the render node. This is especially the case when working with Xref scenes. Sometimes it helps to restart both machines completely.In the case of animation it seems to be better for to render the frames with backburner instead of DR. But in that case it is good to look at the first frames from each render node if they match one another reegarding brightness.....

[caypiranha]

....it seems to be better for to render the frames with backburner instead of DR........

that is also the faster solution as well! I also had this problem a long time and it almost "depressed" me... forget about DR. it's too unreliable to me as well. Maybe Chaosgroup has an explanation on that. I was lucky now to have a faster Workstation, so I don't mind about DR anymore. For Animation, I now use mostly only Onlineservices - that's much faster, and less headache as well. And anyway, you will let participate your clients on some render cost somehow - if doing this not on a private level.

[3d-laboratory]

You´re right, it is much easier to represent a invoice for the online services than to say 5% of my yearly hardware-/software costs are included into the price. Not to mention our competitors from the balkanique states or far east who take a third of our prices...
Which online service do you use?

[caypiranha]

I first used REBUS Farm a long time. They are having quite a good and comfortable System. Help service is good, but not 24/7 available. So based in Germany, it´s about the normal working hours.
Downsides: they are not so flexible. I used TyFlow (still beta and frequently updates) for a project and it was not easy for them to install the little plugin (one File) to the nodes. It would work, but just by using detour. And that was not complex for the time I like to spend for this.
But a farm is complex at all and I guess, maybe they need to rewrite all their Code for being much flexible on fast reactions with the farm.
Power comes all from renewable Energy and since it was based in Germany, the Price for energy is the highest in the world and so it´s not that cheap. And Peoples are also paid under german Law. That all makes it for a most job a good feeling.I´ll use this for medium Projects since costs don't stay all in my hands.

Very good with nice friendly 24/7 Support via Chat, half the price of Rebus, comes "garagefarm.net". Also, the latest release of Tyflow had been installed instantly. They are very up to date. Workflow with Scenecontrol is pretty much forward and stable. But I don't know anything about the energy sources they use.
I´ll find it these days quite important to have aspects like that in mind.

I tried also renderRanch from France. Workflow is quite a bit different, because you pack everything, and upload it then. The frontend of the Web control is a bit confusing. But maybe it´s only my taste. Price might be comparable to Rebus - but haven´t compared it really.
One feature they have - if I understood right - is you can render probably extremely large Pictures. The frame is being stripped and each strip will be rendered on a separate machine. Don't know how many use this feature, but it should be fast for single frame rendering as well. (never tried it)

So sorry, Chaos I am talking here about competitors I haven´t yet used the cloud for serious things. Maybe I try it one Day. Using e.g. TyFow was definitely not possible, last time I need Renderservice.


You said " ...taking third of our prices..." This implies you are operating a renderservice at your own?

[3d-laboratory]

Thank your for your detailed report on render services- As I work with ForestPack, Railclone and sometimes other 3rd party add ins I think the cloud service has to support all these things. I tried it only once years ago with Rebus. I do not providie render services. I meant, that we as freelancers in the so called industrialized countries take much more money per visualisation, so the freelancers from Russia, Ukraine or Vietnam have a great competitive advantage.

[caypiranha]

I understand - yes that's true. i will have a future test what I find about the cloud service. In the end it should be well implemented when working with Vray.

[ian_veenstra]

In my experience mostly this problem is solved by restarting MAX and Vray Spawner. I often have the suspiction that there remain some data in the RAM from previous working states which were reused on the render node. This is especially the case when working with Xref scenes. Sometimes it helps to restart both machines completely.In the case of animation it seems to be better for to render the frames with backburner instead of DR. But in that case it is good to look at the first frames from each render node if they match one another reegarding brightness.....

Restarting the machines didn't seem to help unfortunately. I'm giving backburner a try but I'm running into seperate learning curve based issues with that at the moment. Additionally, so far backburner seems to be much slower. Any other ideas for what could cause the dark buckets?

[3d-laboratory]

At the beginning backburner can be tricky, but when all settings are made correct it works like a charme. As backburner is only a render management tool the render speed only depends from the renderer. The only thing that takes additional time is transfering the data to the render node and starting MAX on that machine. If you do animations MAX has only to start once, not for every frame.
From my other notes on this darker buckets issue:
- make sure that all paths to all XRef objects and scenes are valid and accessable
- make sure that you updated all Xref objects and scenes in the "mother scene"

[ian_veenstra]

Alright so I've got backburner running now but I'm still getting darker frames from one of my servers. I've gone through and made sure all the environmental settings, gamma/lut settings, exposure settings, etc match between the various machines but for some reason still dark.

I remember hearing somewhere once that sometimes you have to render the scene independently on the server machine once before using backburner. Is this true?