DR + Xref Scenes + ? = missing buckets

[gregory_mertens_cg]

I'm experiencing a difficult bug. Difficult in that it's hard to nail down what's actually causing it.

Render Scene:
2012 file with about 15 files scene xrefed into it.
most of those xrefs are filelinks from Revit (via FBX). As you may know there is a known max bug related to the filelink issue.

Error:
If I render from a clean max startup the scene will render fine. Slaves and all.
If I render again, it's fine.
If I save the file and render again, there will be a lot of missing buckets from all the slaves. It's as if the slaves don't load the xrefed scenes.


The only sure fix I've come up with is to close ALL running instances of max and reload my parent file, then render.

"restart slaves on render end" - does not seem to fix it.

suspects
Right now i'm checking if it's related to Gamma settings. I changed my system default and many of the older xrefs still have the old gamma setting. That appears to be a promising cause.

Any other ideas?
Is this a known issue?

...gregory

[gkolln]

Hi Gregory,

We had allot of similar problems that all seemed to be related to plugins we are using.

We use RP manager and for some weird reason our cameras would get corrupt from time to time, meaning that when we spawned the DR computers in our farm couldn't locate the scene camera and used a default camera location at 0,0 looking down. We tested this but putting a teapot below 0,0 and found that that is what the spawners would see. The solution was simple - duplicate the camera and point RP to the new camera. Always fixes it.

The other issue was the use of color correct. Color correct causes the max process to hold after shutdown and the only way to fix it is to kill the process from task manager. What this meant for spawning was that the first time we spawn a scene with CC in it, it would work fine, then when we tried to spawn another the spawners wouldn't pick up. This seems to be fixed in 2.2.

I know this isn't your exact issue but it might give you a few more things to try.

Grant

[gregory_mertens_cg]

Grant,

Thanks for the info. I'm going to try the teapot idea. That at least will let me know if the camera is getting lost.

I opened and saved all of my xrefs with the new Gamma settings. Also I turned off the auto-updated on the scene xrefs and the problem seems to have gone away.

Chaos Group - You guys might want to play with changing those settings with xrefs to see if a bug bubbles up.

I'll try to explore more too once my deadline has passed.

...gregory

[vlado]

Could it be that 3ds Max changes the paths to the x-ref scenes when saving the master file so that the slaves are no longer able to find those files?

Best regards,
Vlado

[gregory_mertens_cg]

Vlado,

The xref's are pathed to UNC. So I don't think so. I opened the vray temp files that the slave was rendering and it had the correct paths.

I fired Autodesk Vault and it still was doing it. So that's not it.
I changed all files so that they are not set to auto-update, and it still errors.

I tried the teapot test and nothing showed

My current theory is that it is camera's being xrefed in that is causing the problem. I've taken mine out and we'll see what happens.

...gregory