V-ray dead! - no response on pressing render

[LQ2]

I have, last week, updated v-ray to version 3.00.07 and having successfully (eventually after descovering that the licensing port was not open on the firewall) tested it last week. This week I have tried to render a scene created with the last version of v-ray and I get nothing! I press the render button, with distributed rendering enabled, and v-ray never gets going. The v-ray messages log has only:
Host is 3dsmas, version 16
V-Ray DLL version is 3.00.07
Saving 3ds Max scene...

The rendering dialogue box shows that the current task is "transforming vertices..." but the common parameters shows everything at 99 (frame#, last fame time, elapsed time... etc).

If I turn dirtributed off, it seems to work, but it will take ages without the render nodes!

I really need help with this as we are a bit time critical this week and little or no rendering capability is a huge problem.

Cheers,

Bill
JTP

[vlado]

Is it on any scene, or just this one? How long does it take to save the scene normally?

Best regards,
Vlado

[LQ2]

At the moment it is only on this one scene, as I have not tested any others. Saving of this scene normally takes a few seconds.

What is strange is that normally when you hit the render button v-ray takes over and the max user interface isn't usable. In this case, I can still access all the normal features of max after I've hit render. It's like v-ray has finished, or given up. The only problem is that I can't then send another render, as I can't close the "Rendering" window that v-ray opens.

Last week I successfully rendered from the same file using v-ray 3. The only thing that has changed is an updated to one of the x-ref files.

I'll do some more tests and get back to you.

Cheers,

Bill

[LQ2]

I have done some tests, going back to the old files that I rendered successfully last week, and all have worked without a hitch. I have checked the x-ref files and changed the old x-refs in the old master file to the new ones, and rendered fine. We have then opened the new master file, changed the x-ref to the old model file, and that render did not work. Therefore there must be a major problem with the new file, but we have not explored to find out what other differences there are between the files.

Would it be useful for me to send the master file with the problem to you for analysis? (max archive)

At this moment, as we are able now to render the views that we need, this does not need to be taken any further, but if you think it would be useful for your investigation I can sort out the files.

Cheers,

Bill

[vlado]

Yes, please send it to support@chaosgroup.com

Best regards,
Vlado

[LQ2]

Hi Vlado,

I have sent an archive of this file with problems to the email address above. Please let me know if you find anything.

It is worth noting that Max told me that there is a file missing (missing asset) when I tried to archive it, but I could not find any missing assets in the file it said. I also tried to archive the file it said had missing assets, but the archive failed with no particular reason.

I hope you are successful.

Kind regards,

Bill

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Thanks for the scene - we got the same behavior here.
The strange thing is that the issue disappears when:

1.Forest Pack is not installed on the machine
or if
2.One of the Xref files is disabled (it doesn't matter which one)
or if
3.Merge Xref files in the scene and remove the sub-xref-files that comes from merging. They are already disabled so removing them will not change anything in the scene except that the issue will disappear.
or if
4.Cam02 is removed

Would it be possible to delete the Cam02 object from the master file without changing anything else and run another test render into your environment?
Let us know the result afterwards.

[LQ2]

Hi Svetlozar,

That is really weird! I did as you said and deleted Cam02 from the scene and now it renders correctly, no problems (apart from me not rendering the right window and getting only white because the render viewport was locked to the wrong window!).

As I said before, I have been able to recover the scene from an older version which didn't have the problem, but it is a bit of a strange one. It seems that that camera, or something in the scene just got a bit corrupted.

As you looked around the scene, you may also have noticed that there are instances of some cameras suffixed with "_FIX" this was to fix a rendering problem with v-ray 2.x where sometimes you would get random distributed rendering errors with black buckets, or a single black bucket render. Instancing the camera would fix these issues. Do you know if this problem was fixed in v-ray 3?

Thanks for looking into the problem. Are you going to explore further?

Cheers,

Bill

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Yes it is possible that the camera(or something else) has broken somehow - we are going to investigate it further, the case is already sent to our developers.

As for the black buckets issue you are talking about - would you please let me know what should I do(what steps should I follow) in order to test it correctly with version 3.x?

[LQ2]

The black bucket issue was connected strongly with v-ray 2.x, and therefore I have not had chance to see if it will re-occur with v-ray 3.x. If it does, you will be the first to know

Cheers,

Bill

[LQ2]

Following on from my reply yesterday that I didn't know if the problem still existed... well I can provide a file with exactly that problem! I'll send it to support<at>chaosgroup.com

EDIT: - I have sent the file via We-Transfer. -

Cheers,

Bill

[LQ2]

Hi Chaosgroup, did someone receive the .zip I sent, mentioned above?

Cheers,

Bill

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Yes the file is in our queue - I am investigating it now.
I'll notify you as soon as I have some news about it.