DR Slaves are not rendering

[Olli96]

I have a huge problem with an animation i am doing right now. So far i calculated the LC and now i wanted to calculate the irradiance map, and here is the problem, my render slaves are only rendering the first frame, after that my worksation is prepassing the frames alone, they slaves just dont join the fun.
Another strange thing is that once my workstation is done with a frame i will get the message in the vray log that the slaves are starting, but only after the whole frame is done allready and they never start to do anything except for the first frame. Sometimes one slave is starting but i only had that once. I also attached some screenshot, dont know if they help, first on is frame 0 were everything is fine, the other ones are the one were nothing happens. I am using the incremental add mode for the prepass but i also tried multiframe incremental which makes no difference.

WinXP64
3dsmax Design 2009
VRay 1.5 SP4a


EDIT: tried to switch to single frame, just to see what happens....well like before, the first frame is fine, on the second frame there is allready one slave missing, on the third frame two more slaves are missing and on the 4th frame guess what, my workstation is rendering alone.....this is drinving me crazy.
I am using the n-th frame method but i dont think it has something to do with it.

[vlado]

Does it work on a simple scene?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Olli96]

It works in a simple scene
I am testing it right now in a different scene of the animation. What could be the problem in a complex scene? I dont need DR for a simple scene and it was working before, the only change we made was to update from SP3a to SP4a.
if the test right now is not working too then i will try to reinstall SP3a and see if thats makes a difference.

[Olli96]

Different scene, 3.8 million Polys, same thing
First frame is fine after that the slaves wont render. I checked the task manager on the slaves and there is no activity at all (cpu usage is at 2%)

[vlado]

Ok then, would it be possible to get me that scene to vlado@chaosgroup.com so that I can check what's wrong?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Olli96]

Well, i give up

It seems that once my workstation starts a frame everything else is blocked. If i dont get a message that server xxx.xxx.x.x is starting to render in the vray log before my workstation starts the frame then they dont join in. The Log freezes once the workstation starts (see attached images). My workaround right now is to calculate the irradiance map by hand right now through backburner. So i submit frame 0 to backburner, frame 10, frame 20 and so on. This works, all slaves are working on the frames. The downside of course is that i cant use an incremental mode which makes the calculation 3x as high as if i would do it in one go. I also have to manually merge all irr maps togehter but at least i might be able to have everything computed by tomorrow so i can render the final frames over the weekend.
If someone has a better solution then i would much appreciate to hear them

EDIT: The scene is quite big, i will upload it on our server and send you a download link.

[Olli96]

hi vlado,
did you had a look at the file and did it work like its supposed to be? any solution?

[Olli96]

Well....since vlado hasnt answered yet i think he couldnt reproduce our problem. I think however that i might have found a solution. Could it be that it has something to do with inerpolated materials? i was running a script that gets rid of all interpolation flags in all scene materials and since that i can use the incremental modes again. If load the old scene without getting rid of those materials i still have the problem. I couldnt really test it because i have lots of work to do right now but i will definetly test some more when i have more time.