Misbehaving lights in network rendering.

[visualride]

I have a scene that isn't behaving with network rendering, and not even on my single machine. When I render on my machine only it appears that around my street lamps the bright highlights are flickering on and off. When I render the scene through our network, all the lights seem to have their multipliers way up, except for the images redered on my machine. Previous daylight scenes all rendered fine. I went through my entire scene and got rid of opacity mapping, translucency, and refraction. I've changed every setting that I can think of and everything that I've read in this forum, but this problem still persists. Let me know if you need a scene file to check out.

There are about 45 free point lights.

[Dynedain]

Can you please show examples of the problem. Like 2 frames where one has the problem, the other doesn't.

Also please mention if you are using any "linked" files for objects, like Xref or Vray Proxies.

Third, omni lights are slooooooooooow and generally unneccessary.

[visualride]

Thanks for the fast reply Dynedain. No I don't have any linked files such as Xref's or Proxies. I'm spending the day with Tree Storm to get up to speed on 3d trees for the future. I'm using the free point lights for 'web distribution' lighting. What kind of lights do you recommend?

Here is a frame rendered on my machine:


Here is a frame rendered on another machine:

[Dynedain]

Your first image link is pointing back to your settings image.

[Dynedain]

In that situation, depending on how close your animation gets to the lamps, I would just put in a vray light material for the glass with a nice white to slight orange falloff map, and set the multiplier to 3 and be done with it. If you really need a visible bulb though, I'd recommend vray sphere lights with a low subdivision so it doesn't hit your rendertime too hard.

[Dynedain]

Also, I would use edit poly + soft select to raise the middle of your road a bit so that its not perfectly flat. Roads in subdivisions like that are usually curved a bit so that water drains from the middle to the gutters.

[Dynedain]

Ahah, you are using a "linked file".... the distribution web file for the lights

Your network render node can't reach the file, so it can't use it... just like a bitmap in a material.

[visualride]

Thanks, Dynedain I'll try that. I edited the link to my first sunset picture. Hosting images sure is a pain in the ass. Is this what every one goes through? How do people show images instead of links to pictures?

[visualride]

Dude! You caught it. I'll put my collection of lighting files in a nice networked location. This project was a bit rushed, so I guess I didn't bother raising the middle of the road yet. The lighting is all off, but I wanted to get past this flickering problem before I moved on.
Thanks!