Net Render Problem?

[Steve_Brinca]

I have a animated scene with about 25 onyx trees converted to vray mesh, buildings and 3d people. We just installed vray sp2 yesterday, everything was rendering perfectly through the net render prior to installing sp2.

We started having problems as soon as we put in a 5 animated onyx trees and converted them to the vray animated proxies.

We have about 11 dual quad core pc machines in our farm (running windows server 2003)all with 3.25 gigs of ram,one dual core mac mini(running xp pro) with 1 gig of ram, and 2 dual quad core pc workstations with 3.25 gigs of ram(also used for rendering) .

When I send the scene through the net, only one of the pc's and the mac render the scene. All of the other machines start building the light cache and then do a hard crash. How is it possible that the mac with 1 gig of ram and only one pc can render the scene but the other machines cannot? Do I have too many vray animated trees in my scene? Because when I exclude the animated proxies from the scene and send it through the net, it renders. I have it on dynamic memory and like I said everything was fine until I put in the animated trees.

Vlado, was there something wrong we did with the installation or is it a bug? The scene right now has really low settings.

Irradience Map:Medium 30 15
Light Cache: 100 Sample Size: 0.02
Everything else default because where mainly doing tests renders right now.

Hopefully I explained the situation right.

We are running max 2008 and vray sp2.

Thanks.

[Morne]

have you tried changing the value for the dynamic memory?
try pushing it up to something crazy like 2500 and see what happens?

[Steve_Brinca]

I tried 2600 and I still couldn't get it to render. Any other suggestions? I took out the animated trees and it renders fine. We might end up taking them out if I can't get it to render. So any suggestion to keep them in the scene would help us out a lot. Thanks.

[Morne]

hmmm this might be a long shot but what happens if you double your swap file (virtual memory or page file)? This is in Windows system properties. Not really sure 100% how to solve your problem, but just throwing ideas your way to try. Who knows, maybe it helps...

[dbibb]

How large are the file sizes on the animated proxies? Maybe your network just can't push that amount of data to every machine. If they are indeed large, you can try copying them locally to each machine.

[Fermi]

Which computer, besides the Mac is rendering properly?, and what OS is it running? Systems that crash are always the same or change randomly?

The OS on your systems is 64 bit?

If not, are your systems /3Gb switch enabled? there is a sticky post in the forums that explain how to.

To know what's going on, do monitor Windows Task Manager on the servers while rendering and crashing, you'll know how much memory was used being used...

Best

Fermí

[Steve_Brinca]

I figured it out. I was making the proxy meshes into copies instead of instances. I had about 30 different proxies for one tree. Duh! I switched them all to instances and now it renders perfectly. Thanks for all the help anyway! I really appreciate it. Thanks.