What would cause this?

[devin]

I'm rendering an animation on a network of about 50 machines, I've saved the IR & LC maps on a network drive that is accessible by all the machines but I keep getting a "V-ray could not load irradiance map" error on some of them. This isn't the first animation I've rednered so I know the system works but for some reason now it seems like I'm getting this error a lot more often. I've checked the vray log on one of the machines, this is what the error says:

" Loading irradiance map from file "\\Fs01\netrender\Light Maps\PA.vrmap"...
[2010/Feb/5|01:35:18] warning: Error loading irradiance map: File format error
[2010/Feb/5|01:35:18] Retrying to load irradiance map (0)..."

Anyone know what might be going on?

[sea2stars]

What OS is running on the machine where the IR and LC maps are stored? With 50 machines you might easily be hitting the connection limit.

[devin]

We're running Server 2003 R2 standard edition, there are 13 machines giving me this error over and over again.

[Neilg]

It happened a lot when our frame server went down for the day. We had the entire farm writing frames to resources and trying to get 100+mb IRmaps from it too, I assumed it was a temporary connection issue.
Not had it since either.

[devin]

What's strange is that at least one of the machines will start to render buckets, I watched it get at least half way through an image but then it crashes and I get the error. I always thought that each machine would read the IR or LC file once and didn't need to have access to it until it was fished rendering that frame. Does anyone know if that's the case or does the machine need access to the file the whole time it renders? Maybe the machine in question is loosing it's connection to the server intermentley and that's why it's crashing?

[muzzy]

I dont know your answer but I know a work around...

Either put the IR Map to another server or copy the IR Map to each machine with a simple batch or use http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp

For copy
Copy your IR map to Each machines Shared folder. It will definitely render fast anyways especially first frames.