Render nodes occasionally render frames without HDRI map

[vladimir_krastev]

If you have a server and all render nodes look for the HRDI in the same place it makes sense to use absolute path for it.

This is how absolute path looks in 3ds max's asset tracker:


This is how relative path looks like:


Check Autodesk's help pages as well - Paths Menu (Asset Tracker)

This may not be the reason for your issue, I am sharing it just as a good practice.

[clay_creative]

Are the HDRIs on a file server? How big are they? Are they tiled (MIP mapped) EXRs ? What format?

Is the file server Samba based? What version?

Thanks for the reply.
We have the assets on a NAS (qnap) on the network.
The HDRI is 21MB .hdr file
not sure if the network storage uses Samba or not (I'm not great with IT). But its a QNAP NAS. How would I find out?

Many thanks

Luc

[clay_creative]

Hi, thanks for posting.

How do you manage your assets?
Do you have a library that each machine has to reach and find the HDRI maps?
If you are using relative paths to the assets, try using absolute paths.

Many thanks for the fast reply
We have the assets on a NAS (qnap) on the network.

Not sure we are using relative or absolute paths, how do we set this, and do I need to set it on all of the render nodes, or just the workstation that submits the job?

Many thanks

Luc

[Joelaff]

Are the HDRIs on a file server? How big are they? Are they tiled (MIP mapped) EXRs ? What format?

Is the file server Samba based? What version?

[vladimir_krastev]

Hi, thanks for posting.

How do you manage your assets?
Do you have a library that each machine has to reach and find the HDRI maps?
If you are using relative paths to the assets, try using absolute paths.

[clay_creative]

Hi,

This is a really strange problem.

We have 10 PCs/rendernodes on a farm. We often light our scenes with HDRI. Occasionally some rendered scenes have frames that look darker. When we look closer we can see that the frames that are darker simply have the dome light either turned off or missing the HDRI map (not really sure which). If this happens, it will only be one of the PC's on the farm that does this, so luckily we can tell Deadline (that we are using to manage the farm) to re-render all the frames done by that PC. But I'd still like to resolve the problem as it wastes time.

What is really weird is that this doesn't happen on every scene, and when it does happen is can be any PC/rendernode, so its not like one of the PC's is having this problem, it can be any of them.

Because it doesn't happen on every job and when it does happen its on a different rendernode each time. I'm really struggling to diagnose what could be causing the problem.

Here are some thoughts that I have on what could be causing it.

1. The Scene is taking up too much RAM on the render node and therefore is not loading in the HDRI
2. The network is being oveloaded with traffic and so the rendernode can't access the HDRI file
3. There is some kind of licencing problem with VRAY
4. There is some abnormally with the network paths or location of the HDRI

Most of the above, I think would not be the problem, as things like licencing issues would simply stop the rendernode from rendering, not make it unable to see a HDRI map?

If anyone has any thoughts suggestions or advice on trying to find out what is going on, that would be great.

Many thanks

Luc