pale/dark DR buckets

[digitalx3d]

hmmm... Sam I'll pay attention to the time delay issue, but my gut feeling is that I swear I've had this happen to me even after several minutes have gone by (more than enough time for the vrayDummy scene to load). Interesting discovery though about the VrayHDR map!! Tashko, one other thing I noticed... I use Max 2012 (with SP2 installed) and the bitmap loader has 3 options- Use images own gamma, Use system gamma, and Override. I typically use the "system" option as I don't have to bother checking anything... system is default. I typically also use gamma 2.2, and when I see this issue I get the workstation producing correctly colored buckets, and when the slaves begin (during the IRMap calc) they render LIGHTER colored buckets. Then when the raytracing begins I get lighter buckets scattered throughout.

[tashko.zashev]

Hi Samuel,

Managed to reproduce it here as well (only 2-3 times of 20 renders, but is reproduced)! Thank you for adding more details on this. Actually the "restart slaves on render end" option was not ticked in my previous tests. This option is not being saved in the max file, V-Ray reads it locally from the "vray_dr.cfg" file. However, now I'm trying to find any dependency and a way to reproduce it more often.
I will keep you posted.

[tashko.zashev]

hmmm... Sam I'll pay attention to the time delay issue, but my gut feeling is that I swear I've had this happen to me even after several minutes have gone by (more than enough time for the vrayDummy scene to load). Interesting discovery though about the VrayHDR map!! Tashko, one other thing I noticed... I use Max 2012 (with SP2 installed) and the bitmap loader has 3 options- Use images own gamma, Use system gamma, and Override. I typically use the "system" option as I don't have to bother checking anything... system is default. I typically also use gamma 2.2, and when I see this issue I get the workstation producing correctly colored buckets, and when the slaves begin (during the IRMap calc) they render LIGHTER colored buckets. Then when the raytracing begins I get lighter buckets scattered throughout.

Hi John,

The issue you have with different buckets may not be the same as the one reported by Samuel. Would it be possible to provide more details and render examples ?
Are you able to reproduce it every time when render?

[samuel_bubat]

Hi Samuel,

Managed to reproduce it here as well (only 2-3 times of 20 renders, but is reproduced)! Thank you for adding more details on this. Actually the "restart slaves on render end" option was not ticked in my previous tests. This option is not being saved in the max file, V-Ray reads it locally from the "vray_dr.cfg" file. However, now I'm trying to find any dependency and a way to reproduce it more often.
I will keep you posted.

Awesome ! It was really an accidental discovery yesterday. Actually now that I know where it comes from it´s easy to avoid and a minor problem. Before it really made me crazy. We had "restart on render end" turned on because some large scale projects sometimes left the nodes in a zombie state after rendering. But because you don´t feel much of a difference noone bothered to turn it off again. What could possibly go wrong I can only speculate that some things are still loading in the background while max allready opened the scene and it´s probabely more an Autodesk kind of problem.
Cheers...

[pascalls]

It certanly looks like 3ds max problem or shall i dare to say looked like max problem!

I have fixed this issue that was driving me crazy last couple of months by instaling SP5 for 3ds max 2014. I am doing animation that I started in 2014 sp3 and this issue was so bad that the whole animation was just unacceptable. I just cant explain the hell i went through in trying to find the cause of the problem. None of the other stuff suggested here helped.

SP5 for max 2014 fixed the issue 100% - before installation there was problem on every single frame and after the installation everything OK. I am rendering now third clip from this ani and not a single bucket is different on 7 render nodes. Same for DR and backburner.


Hope this helps someone!

[tashko.zashev]

Hi again,

I've also reproduced the different buckets issue with Max 2015 and latest V-Ray build. At first sight, it seems to be a 3DS Max problem in their Bitmap loader, but we have to be sure about that so I'm going to send a bug report to our system now. I hope our developers to be able to find where the problem is.
Thank you again Samuel.

Hi Pascalls,

I have fixed this issue that was driving me crazy last couple of months by instaling SP5 for 3ds max 2014. I am doing animation that I started in 2014 sp3 and this issue was so bad that the whole animation was just unacceptable. I just cant explain the hell i went through in trying to find the cause of the problem. None of the other stuff suggested here helped.

SP5 for max 2014 fixed the issue 100% - before installation there was problem on every single frame and after the installation everything OK. I am rendering now third clip from this ani and not a single bucket is different on 7 render nodes. Same for DR and backburner.

Thanks for sharing your experience. Sometimes is very hard to find what causes the different buckets in DR mode.

[digitalx3d]

Hi Tashko,
For me the issue is not scene specific. It happens with DR only. I have the option to restart slaves on render end ACTIVE. Pretty much any time I start a render and cancel it part way through, I get the lighter buckets produced by the render slaves. The "tinting" of the buckets may be due to the gamma settings. Almost like when the slaves are quickly restarted on a render job the gamma info isn't being included with the rest of the scene info. The texture bitmap gets transferred, it is present in the rendering... but the gamma is incorrect. It just happened to me right now. If I see this happen and cancel, it will almost definitely do it again regardless of when I restart the render. BUT, if I let it finish (rendering incorrectly), wait a minute or two, and then restart, it will render properly. The scene is attached. Max 2012, SP2. Vray 2.4. Windows 7.

Garage_Tashko.zip

[Bruce Hart]

John's scenario above sounds pretty much what we experience. The other day I took a problem render into photoshop and tried to manually adjust the gamma of one bucket next to another. I couldn't get it to match, but perhaps this would not work anyway due to technical reasons I don't understand. Perhaps this is due to the wrong lighting solution being calculated with gamma and not just post gamma? Don't know. We are using 3DS Max Design 2014 with SP5, and still have the problem.

[tashko.zashev]

Hello Tim and Bruce,

Unfortunately I don't have confirmation from our developers that this Gamma issue is V-Ray related or just a bug in the 3DS Max Bitmap loader, but it seems to appear more often in your renders.
Tim, we will test the scene you have attached and see if it's the same case or something different.
By the way, what about if you use V-Ray HDRI loader for all textures or uncheck "Restart slaves on render end"? Does it fix the bucket difference?

The other day I took a problem render into photoshop and tried to manually adjust the gamma of one bucket next to another. I couldn't get it to match, but perhaps this would not work anyway due to technical reasons I don't understand.

Yes, this is not going to work. For an example if you have a texture used in lights or light material and it is loaded with different gamma, the entire GI and lighting produced by this render node will be different. And this difference will not be exactly 2.2.

[svetlozar.draganov]

Hi Tashko,
For me the issue is not scene specific. It happens with DR only. I have the option to restart slaves on render end ACTIVE. Pretty much any time I start a render and cancel it part way through, I get the lighter buckets produced by the render slaves. The "tinting" of the buckets may be due to the gamma settings. Almost like when the slaves are quickly restarted on a render job the gamma info isn't being included with the rest of the scene info. The texture bitmap gets transferred, it is present in the rendering... but the gamma is incorrect. It just happened to me right now. If I see this happen and cancel, it will almost definitely do it again regardless of when I restart the render. BUT, if I let it finish (rendering incorrectly), wait a minute or two, and then restart, it will render properly. The scene is attached. Max 2012, SP2. Vray 2.4. Windows 7.

[ATTACH]21525[/ATTACH]

We managed to reproduce the issue on that scene but unfortunately only once. I am trying to record a screen-cast right now but for some reason the bug doesn't appear anymore even though I am executing the same steps I did before. Would it be possible to give us more precise steps how to reproduce it exactly? It would be even better if you could capture it on video.

Thank you very much in advance.

[digitalx3d]

I'll try to track my steps, but it's nature seems so random. Have you tried to reproduce it by cancelling a perfectly good render process? And then restarting it moments later? I think what I typically see is that I set the image to render and then once I see something in the VFB that is incorrect, I'll cancel. I've not really paid attention to exactly when I do this, but most likely it's during the IR map calculation (though I know there would be times that I'd wait till I could see more detail in the raytrace pass). So, I'd make the quick fix to my scene and then restart the render. This is often when I see the issue, on this subsequent render attempt. After it happens this first time, if I cancel during the rendering, it's almost guaranteed to happen again if I try to render again immediately or even after a couple minutes. Sometimes, I have to either restart the spawners or close Max and reopen the scene, or both. Today I'll try to pay attention to what kinds of fixes I'm doing... whether they are mesh related or texture... or some other parameter change.

[svetlozar.draganov]

I have tried to cancel the render on many different places, like actual rendering, IM calculation, LC calculation and etc for about 2 hours but I got the issue only once.
I also canceled the render when the issue appeared but it didn't occur on the next render.

I would like to point out that this is the same issue that other users reported and our developers have doubts that this bug is on Autodesk side because of the Bitmap loader.

Would it be possible to convert all the Bitmap-nodes inside the scene to VrayHDRI ones and try to reproduce the issue again?
You can do that very easy with V-Ray Bitmap to VrayHDRI converter:

[fraggle]

BANG!
I'm afraid the bug reach my place! The darker bucket are done by the master.
About the vray HDRI loader, can it be apply after the IR&LC have already been calculated or do I need to do again compute the IR and LC?
Thanks

[tashko.zashev]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]21588[/ATTACH] BANG!
I'm afraid the bug reach my place! The darker bucket are done by the master.
About the vray HDRI loader, can it be apply after the IR&LC have already been calculated or do I need to do again compute the IR and LC?
Thanks

Actually I haven't tried such a workflow so far, but there should be no problems.
Could you run a quick test render in small resolution just in case?

[IVOR_IP]

Have you checked if all the maps have gamma consistently assigned?