DR problems

[Tommy L]

Im having a problem with DR.
When I hit render, servers show up in the message log saying
"Scene started; starting render."

But the buckets never show up and the nodes then say they have completed rendering way before the render is complete.

When I look aty the task manager there is no spike in resources to suggest the nodes are doing anything at all.

For the purpose of this I am just using one plain vray material and some vray lights. The rendering looks fine, I just cant get the nodes to kick in. It ios not scene specific. I have opened some old files and the same problem persists.

Setup: Vray (1.5sp4) Max Design 2010 W7.

It was working on Friday!

[Tommy L]

Could it be a wibu driver issue?

[Tommy L]

This is what the log looks like.

[Tommy L]

Anybody? This could turn problematic if I cant fix it in day or so.

[squeakybadger]

Anybody? This could turn problematic if I cant fix it in day or so.

Any firewalls running? Windows firewall has a habit of turning itself back on.
And can you ping the other computers before starting DR?

[jacksc02]

any missing plugins/scripts on the slaves?
Check the vraylog of the salve machines to get an idea of what is happening

[digitalx3d]

Did you recently install a newer version of max or backburner anywhere on your network? Or do any machines have a newer version of Vray than other machines? Or are you running say, Max2010 w/Vray SP4 AND an older version of Max and Vray? Make sure that EVERYTHING is consistent across ALL machines. Make sure that you're not running different versions of VraySpawner. All machines should be running the newest version of VraySpawner only. You also might just want to try going back to BB v.2007 if you're on a newer version. (if you do this, there are some registry entries you need to create for newer versions of max). PM me if you need help with that.

I had a similar issue a couple months ago. Took me awhile to get it all figured out.

[Tommy L]

Any firewalls running? Windows firewall has a habit of turning itself back on.
And can you ping the other computers before starting DR?

The firewall was turned on on the host machine, Ive turned it off but it didnt help.

any missing plugins/scripts on the slaves?
Check the vraylog of the salve machines to get an idea of what is happening

I have just installed Max Design 2010 across the board, I have not yet installed the any plugins or scripts.

Did you recently install a newer version of max or backburner anywhere on your network? Or do any machines have a newer version of Vray than other machines? Or are you running say, Max2010 w/Vray SP4 AND an older version of Max and Vray? Make sure that EVERYTHING is consistent across ALL machines. Make sure that you're not running different versions of VraySpawner. All machines should be running the newest version of VraySpawner only. You also might just want to try going back to BB v.2007 if you're on a newer version. (if you do this, there are some registry entries you need to create for newer versions of max). PM me if you need help with that.

I had a similar issue a couple months ago. Took me awhile to get it all figured out.

All (node) machines should be identical. Only diffenrence on the host is the OS is w7, whereas the nodes are all XPpro64.
Is BB utilised when enabling DR?
I updated BB on one machine to see if that was the problem.
Oh hang on, do I need to do one render via BB before DR will work? I seem to remember that was a prerequisite of DR last time I installed a new max (200.

[squeakybadger]

Give the backburner job a try, I don't think it sets it up properly until you do. If you still have probs, try pinging other pc's to and from the problem DR slaves to see if it is able to communicate properly.

[digitalx3d]

you do, but I'm not sure that will solve the problem.

What will be helpful is to create a map or spreadsheet of your network and for each machine write down what version(s) of Max, Vray, BB, and VraySpawner each has running (whether you're using them or not for this project). Windows version won't make any difference.

If you just installed Max Design 2010 you may have also upgraded all your BackBurner versions (depending on what version of Max you had previously been running).

I had problems with BB 2008, and once I returned to 2007 all was well.

[Tommy L]

Thanks for all the help guys, problem solved...mostly.

I have 2 workstations and 7 nodes. Only the primary workstation has W7. I have my other one I use for photoshop etc. However, I have 2 Max licenses, so Everything is also installed on the secondary workstation.
I moved the Vray dongle to the secondary workstation. After re-routing all the license thingies to look for that one, everything works fine. I can only assume its a permissions issue in W7. The permissions are kind of weird anyway. Even though Im logged on with admin privileges, there are all kinds of protocol I dont understand yet. I have some issues with copy/pasting files over the network also, but I just use work-arounds.

Anyway, the solution was one of those things that is kind of arbitrary. Tripped me up for two days though. One thing I still dont understand is why the Vray messages never said it was a license issue?

Thanks all,
Tom.