One machine on farm rendering with v-ray watermark?

[emptyvoxel]

Hi there,

We have a render farm of 26 machines, and I've rendered tens of thousands of frames on it with no problems, but today when I came in I was met with a new, very strange occurance.
I had five animations stacked up in backburner, all walkthroughs with precalculated lightcache and irradiance map, and the first one had completed with no problems.
In the second animation, though, I noticed that about every 30 frames there was a slight tilt to the image, as though the camera had been rotated a couple of degrees in the Y-axis. Upon further inspection I also noticed the frames were slightly transparent, and one had a v-ray watermark on it.
I tracked it down to one machine, and then went back to the previous animations and checked the frames that machine had rendered. They were just fine. I checked to make sure all updates are installed on the machine, and they are... max 9 64, v-ray 1.5 sp1. I made sure it was correctly pointing to our bedongled license server, and it is.
So, what are the circumstances that would cause a machine to render, but to watermark the image? Why one animation and not the others? It's not a big deal this time because I'll just re-render the frames, but I'd like to avoid this in the future, especially if it starts to affect more than one machine.

Thanks,
Michael

[vlado]

It would be best to un-install V-Ray from that machine, make sure that no V-Ray files have remained from a previous version (in particular, cgauth.dll) and then reinstall the sp1.

Best regards,
Vlado

[emptyvoxel]

Thanks Vlado, I'll give that a try. It's just so strange that it would do this for one particular animation and not any others...

[chapmandu]

Hi Vlado,

We had what appears to be the same issue listed below. We rendered 2200 frames from a project and we found 3 frames to have this slight rotation and watermark that emptyvoxel describes below. Upon investigating, we discovered that all 3 affected frames came from the same render node.

What was wierd was the other 100 or so frames this same node did on the same project were fine.

Since then, we have rendered out numerous other animations, from this same project, as well as others and haven't seen it again.

If we do see it again, we'll take your advice and uninstall v-ray, making sure all components are uninstalled and then reinstalled.

[thedoubtfulguest]

More watermark problems

We seem to be getting similar problems on our farm the past few nights and each night it's a different machine. All of these machines have been installed with a fresh max and vray so I don't know what the problem could be. We've also had a lot of problems with loosing our VRay licenses that are served from the network. I'm guessing this is all related to network problems of some sort and it can't find the license when it needs too. What's the best way to serve the VRay licenses? I've tried serving them from 3 machines on the farm and also from each machine using VRay locally and neither seems to work.

[jujubee]

how many computers are you talking about? Also, do you have individual dongles for each one?

I believe the licensing has an option to add additional values to one dongle (each license is 10 machines except when using backburner I believe) - perhaps all being served from one machine should help better.

[chapmandu]

We've also had a lot of problems with loosing our VRay licenses that are served from the network. I'm guessing this is all related to network problems of some sort and it can't find the license when it needs too. What's the best way to serve the VRay licenses? I've tried serving them from 3 machines on the farm and also from each machine using VRay locally and neither seems to work.

Most of our V-ray render nodes, (which is about 15 right now), are looking back at a dongle on one of our main work stations. When rendering with backburner, we really don't have any problems with license dropping. As long as the V-ray License Server is running on the work station that the dongle is attached to, we haven't had any problems with backburner.

If we're talking about distributed rendering, well that's a different story. We have had sporadic problems with nodes "hanging". Sometimes, if we close out the spawner and then restart it, it helps, but many times that will only work for another render or two, then you have to restart it again.

Are you running 1.50.SP1??

[emptyvoxel]

I just had a recurrance of this problem, but this time it is on one of our nearly brand-new Boxx Render servers. It has only had V-ray 1.5 sp1 installed, no other versions of v-ray. This time I caught it midway through the animation, and simply restarting the computer seems to have fixed the problem.

~Michael

[vlado]

This issue should be corrected now for SP2.

Best regards,
Vlado

[emptyvoxel]

Excellent!

[joa_grilo]

Hi all,
same problem here as chapmandu.
It as become a major problem at us, because were trying to finish some big animations and it creates random watermarked and tilted frames.

we will try starting the license server in the workstations. but i dont know if its going to work.

Thanks.

João Grilo
Dreamlab