dr bucket render irregularity

[giancarlo_007]

hi ya,

was wondering if anyone could possibly shed some light on why i'm getting these differences in DR bucket rendering?

Got 10 slaves allocated to the scene and it seems that when I send the project, 1 or 2 computers are rendering the image differently. It seems that the problem computers are rendering a very dark version of the final render.

The IR and Lightcache's are Pre Calc and stored on the server so all the slaves can access the files. Its strange because all the textures associated with the scene are shared on the server.

is there anything i can do to the problem machines to make them render properly????

many thanks in advance

giancarlo

[voltron7]

Damn, I'd love if anyone had a solution for this, too. Other than all the "known" suggestions of versions, permissions, decimal points, commas, paths, regional settings, etc.

[Clifton Santiago]

This does not look like the slight bucket differences that can be fixed by the issues that voltron7 is mentioning. It looks more like a node or two is not seeing the saved IR/LC maps at all. Are your light maps (.vrmap and .vrlmap) pathed correctly with UNC or located on a shared drive that all nodes can see? Are all nodes running vray spawner with admin permissions? Do you have the same problem when you don't precalcualte them?

[mike_kennedy]

Check that the default gamma settings on all machines are the same as well. We see this type of thing when machines have different gamma settings.
Though from the looks of the image I would agree with the imap not being picked up...

[Aldaryn]

Yes, certainly look like those buckets are missing GI info. Still, its a bit odd, that outside it is much brighter in the "bad" buckets. With GI missing, I woul expect daker colors there too.

Best regards,
A.

[voltron7]

Check that the default gamma settings on all machines are the same as well. We see this type of thing when machines have different gamma settings.
Though from the looks of the image I would agree with the imap not being picked up...

Could you give a bit more description for this process? Is there somewhere in the O.S. where this gets set, or did you mean in 3ds max's gamma settings?
Thanks for any clarification

Oh, yeah, sort of might be related question...if I did need to adjust the Max gamma settings on the slave, how is that done without launching the 3dsmax application on the slave? I only ask, because the slave's copy is unregistered so even if I accidentally ran it, the 30 day countdown would begin!
Thanks

[Clifton Santiago]

You don't need to change the gamma settings on the slave. The gamma settings of the source file are understood by all nodes both in DR and BB.

[voltron7]

Thanks Clifton, good to know that, too, but I'm still wondering what mike_kennedy was refering to, specifically...I have this issue with some scenes even without a saved IR map.

[Clifton Santiago]

Well, you could always test by disabling gamma correction in the max scene, and see if it eliminates the problem. I have never had problems with render nodes that were due to gamma settings.

[BiTcH]

imo, yes it is gi info file missing....u should try with the same computers but not with irr and lc presaved....

[rajdarge]

yeah I get this problem too.
And its not all the time either. Sometimes I get it when I am not saving the GI or Light cache to a file and to fix it I save the GI etc and load it as a fixed Irradiance map cache and Light Cache thingy. Sometimes it occurs when I have saved GI switch to unsaved GI.

I can see the irradiance map blurring the data accross buckets, but the bucket is still pretty obvious, so I suspect its a light cache problem.

The only reliable way of fixing the problem is to disable DR and render on a single machine

It is usually specific to a single max file or I suspect that a texture map is being dropped somewhere along the line. But since no error is reported its hard to diagnose.

Also its often very hard to reproduce as well. Usually I just put up with it disable DR and render it on my fastest machine in the pipeline and do something else with the now free to use slave.

Such is life.
Raj

[voltron7]

same here, quite frustrating, but I just pretend there is no such thing as DR that I'm missing out on, hehehe. I still feel that it has someting to do with
my mixture of XP64 and 2k pro...but as rajdarge mentiones, no error messages, just screwed up images it used to work for me in previous version while all my machines were win 2k pro. Anyone else miss 2k pro at all?