network rendering discrepancies. . .

[davehitt]

ok, we have 3 dual dual-core processor render nodes that we use as our main workhorses for rendering. and when we're not working on them, we also setup up backburner servers on our desktop machines to render overnight.

all animations are done with precalculated IR maps and precalculated Light Cache maps.

but i keep noticing that very often the frames that are processed by our desktop computers have very noticeable differences than the one produced on our render nodes. at first, i thought that maybe some machines weren't accessing the the textures accurately (the textures are all stored on a server on the network), which indeed turned out to be part of the problem. that was solved and dealt with.
but then i started also seeing differences in fundamental vray calculations, like a specular highlights. glass would render differently on the desktop pc than they would on the render nodes.

all machines have vRay adv 1.47.03
all machines have at least 2 gigs of memory
all are running xp
all are running max 8

i just don't get it. i've been trying to troubleshoot this for about 2 months now. has anybody else had problems like this?

[Syclone1]

Thats definately strange, I was running 1.47.03 on my network consisting of Xeons, AMDs, P3's and P4's running XP Pro, XP media center and Win2k and have not noticed anything like your describing?

-dave

[Morbid Angel]

time to get vray 1.5

[davehitt]

i'm a little skeptical of upgrading vray over something like this, because i feel this shouldn't be a problem at all, regardless of what version i have.

i'm able to correct the problem usually, by just restarting the render job and only using the render nodes. but given our deadlines, we're always looking to quicken our pipeline, and adding more cpu's that are more than equipped to handle the job, shouldn't have to negate that goal.