Backburner Crash on Irr Map Calcs resets Irr map

[travistlo]

So yeah, I sent a file to BB so that I can continue working on another scene.
I have only one machine working on the irr map calcualtion, but it crashed 70% of the way through. After the crash, BB continued on and finished the calc.

I set up the next BB job to render the final frames, and the GI was screwed up, it seemed that the Irr map reset after the crash. Is this supposed to happen?

I had the mode set to Multiframe Incremental, I assumed this was the reason it reset when. I tried it again, it crashed at a differnt point, but this time I set it to incremental add to current, (in hopes that it would reset the irr map before is started). This still didn't work, the first part of the animation was missing the irr map. Since then, I decided to cut the Irr map into 2 differnt parts, so that I can actually get the project done.

I guess what I am trying to ask is: Is this the way it works? I thought vray would write to the irrmap file only after the frame is flag as completed. Why would it reset it if it crashes?

Also, to speed up the time, if using Incremental, can you have more than 1 computer via backburner help render the differnt frames? or does that risk the chance of both (or more) computers trying to write to the same Irr map at the same time?

[RErender]

V-Ray will not reload the previous Imap and just start adding to it, it will just overwrite whatever was there. You could use a callback script and have it reload the previous imap and then incrementaly add from there.

I prefer to render out individual imaps and then merge them together afterwards this way they can all be rendered concurrently on the farm and crashing is not an issue.

I've written a couple tools that can automate the process, saving an imap for each frame with the frame number appended. Just set the paths and you can send the job to BB. There is also a script on my site that will help merge all the imaps into one.

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpB...pic.php?t=8881

[travistlo]

Well, It would be very nice that if in the future development of vray, it can handle this a little better.

If I can imagine a perfect scenario, it would consist of the following features.

1. Many computers being able to add to the irr map. Maybe each computer loads a copy of the current irr map. incrementally adds its samples to it, then merges it with the original. And if 2 computers are trying to merge at the same time, vray should know that one machine is writing to it currently, and wait till its free to write.

2. When choosing incremental add to current, it shouldn't restart the map, it should load what is already in the file, and just continuing to add to it. Or atleast automaticaly start a new file after a crash, that way it can be manually merged after the BB session.

[SnipeyX]

there's a simple one line script that I got from the forums here you can place in the "pre-render script" section of the render dialog that will load your map before each frame, that's what we've done to avoid any overwriting the existing map issues.

Replace with the proper path to map and save this as a .ms

fsin=”\\pathToMap\scene01.vrmap”
renderers.current.loadirradiancemap fsin