Distributed render with xRefs - Black

[PICTURE_PLANE]

Hi,

I have a scene with several xRefs and the distributed rendering gives me black buckets. The cameras and lights are native to the scene file with the geometry referenced in. All xRefs are network paths. The rendering works fine when I turn distributed rendering off. Any ideas?

Many thanks
Joerg

[vlado]

Can you get us a scene for this?

Best regards,
Vlado

[tom spall]

Hi Vlado

I am having exactly the same problem. The scene file distributes fine until I turn the trees xref on. Again, all maps and proxy files are linked via UNC paths. There are no missing proxy or map files. I was thinking that it might be a Dynamic memory issue but have cranked that right up (64000) and it is set to 'Auto' currently. I have tried both other options (Static and Dynamic) but still no joy.

Any help on this would be very useful

cheers

Tom

[svetlozar.draganov]

Hello guys,

We will be glad to help you with this issues.
It will be very helpful for us if your attach the scenes here or sent them to support@chaosgroup.com
Don't forget to mention your Vray/3DSMax versions.

Thank you very much!

[nirsul]

Me too

This scene was OK at first (it rendered the scene and its XREF scene alright) but after modifying the XREF scene and loading the master file ( which in turn loads the XREFed scene) -renders black and very fast as if there is no objects in the scene.
I would send you the file but it is almost 500 Mb.

EDIT: Somehow it is solved (hope that it does not occur again) I launched the XREF dialog and checked the Automatic update - I am not sure if this has to do with it but for now it renders...

EDIT 2 - PROBLEM - Even thought the XREF SCENE is in the unc format it renders empty buckets. I guess I awill have to merge the scene



NIR

[svetlozar.draganov]

We can provide you our FTP server.
Please write to support@chaosgroup.com with request about our FTP.

Thank you in advance.

[gregory_mertens_cg]

I've also had the same problem with several projects. I'm going to email you for FTP info so that i can upload my current (small project) that is having the problem.

[gregory_mertens_cg]

additional info

Setting up the xrefs to auto-refresh is dangerous (for me). If I'm rendering with vray, have an xref set to auto-refresh, start rendering a scene and concurently make a change to that xref scene (and save it), then the rendering instance of max will crash.

So...auto-refresh is not a solution/ workaround.

There are other issues with regard to vray + xref scenes.
1) if a scene is opened with an inactive xref, rendered, activate xref scene and re-render. If the slaves manage to render, they will most often ignore the newly activated xref scene.
2) seems like there were others as well...can't grab them off the top of my head. I may have them listed in my blog.
3) lol...oh yeah. xrefs and real-time rendering doesn't work correctly. It re-renders the whole thing every time. (or something like that...it's been a while)

[svetlozar.draganov]

Hello gregory_mertens_cg

I've tried to reproduce all of the issues you have described in your previous post with a simple scene - but unfortunately everything was working fine here.
I did the tests with 3DSMax 2013 with the last official Vray release , and also with the last nightly build - but none of them gives me these xref-issues.

Is is possible to send us some example scenes ?
Thank you in advance.

[gregory_mertens_cg]

Thanks Svetlozar (very cool name btw),

I've uploaded my files to the ftp.
I'm using max 2012 - product update 12 commercial
vray 2.30.01

[Alphalpha]

whenever i've encountered this problem, it's almost always a missing map file somewhere - sometimes very obscure. Everything looks ok and properly UNC pathed in Asset tracker, but chances are there is still something missing. What i do is archive the file and extract all the maps into one folder (use 'do not extract paths') and through asset tracker, point everything to that folder. Save and reload and it may pop up a msg about which maps are missing. Note: the 3ds max archive utility doesn't like special characters in filenames (like [, ]) so may not pick up all the maps if the file contains some of these characters.

The other thing that could be causing it is heavy network traffic, if you are rendering over a network.

Hope thats of help

[Alphalpha]

... oh, the other thing that could be causing this is if you have the same layer name in both the master/native file and the XRef file and they are in different visibility states i.e. layer is hidden in one file but visible in the other.

What i do to fix this is unload all the XRefs. Go to your layer manager and delete all the empty layers, then re-enable the XRefs. This way the layers and their current state get 'synced' into the master file.

[bob-cat]

Was there a solution to this, I am having the exact same problem?
As soon as I turn DR on with xrefs, it connects and then renders black, but it doesn't actually render the whole image, I see a glimpse of a couple of buckets top left and then the render finishes - all black.
The render is set to crop - maybe this is the issue?
Currently just rendering locally --- soooooooooooo slooooooooooooooooooow

[3LP]

If it's happening only when you spawn,
We have that all the time ...

it's the vraycam that i corrupt, dupe the cam and it will be all fixed...

We have sometimes found that the vraycam is been corrupted and the position and rotation are reset to 0.0.0 when spawning.
That's why you have black buckets (if you don't have anything in 0.0.0) we trouble shooted that 2 years ago by putting a teapot at 0.0.-5 :-p
Only happening when spawning tho.

Stan

[tricky]

Yep - had this for years. Duplicate the camera.