Distributed Rendering DR Issues

[olly]

We have been using DR wihout any problems for years now but all of a sudden 2 new issues have appeared.

1. DR jobs rendered via backburner are behaving as though the "Save hosts in scene" option was checked when it wasn't. ie. only using the servers the workstation that submitted the job was using. This has the knock on effect of not using the workstation in the DR as it is not in its own DR slave list .
2. The machine that receives the DR job is rendering the job in the max session showing the VFB and also by its spawner. We still only get the 12 buckets by checking task manager reveals they are using about 50% each.

Hope I've explained that well enough for everyone to understand?!

We're using vray 2.2 and Max 2011.

Anyone else seen this or have any ideas?

Cheers,
Olly

[ChaosGroup]

Hi,

We will check if we can reproduce the first issue you have described.

Can you give more details about the second problem?

Thank you.

Chaos Group Support Team

[olly]

Can you describe in more details the second problem?

Sure.

First our slaves are setup so that the spawner and backburner server are launched at logon, both as GUI not services. Now if you submit a DR job to slave r-01 via backburner, when it opens the job via server and starts rendering, it's spawner will also start rendering. This is confirmed by checking task manager and seeing two 3dsmax.exe both at 50% cpu usage.

I actually believe this is related to our first problem above, because if I turn off r-01 in the DR slave list on my workstation then submit the job to r-01 this situation doesn't occur.

What has me confused is that we have been using vray 2.2 since release and this problem has only cropped up in the last few weeks. Only change is installation of Max 2013 and backburner 2013, though we are still working in Max 2011.

Hope that helps?

Cheers,
Olly

[ChaosGroup]

Hi,

we made some tests and everything worked as it is supposed to. Surely you are familiar with how DR works but lets put a quick example that could clear any misconceptions.
Lets say that at one workstation (lets call it Station One) we open a scene and put two PCs in the DR list (lets call them Slave One and Slave Two). On Slave One and Slave Two we have only V-Ray Spawner running and no Backburner server. Then we submit a job to a Backburner manager. This manager has only one PC connected with Backburner server (lets call this PC Station Two). Station Two will start 3ds Max and V-Ray will take control of the job. V-Ray will give render jobs only to Slave One and Slave Two! Station Two will not participate in the rendering! If we want Station Two to participate in the rendering we will have to add it to the DR list at Station One before submitting the job and have V-Ray Spawner running at Station Two.
If we move the Backburner server from Station Two to Slave One and we submit the job to Slave One through the Backburner manager, we will have two instances of 3ds Max running on Slave One (one started from Backburner server and one from V-Ray Spawner) but only one of them will render, the other will take care of distributing the job.
When you want to use DR there should be only one Backburner server running at any given time.
If this doesn't help please drop us an email at support@chaosgroup.com and we will decide what to do from there.


Chaos Group Support Team