Distributed render, drop out

[LQ2]

Hi,

I have and run a successful render farm of 7 machines, all with Max 2015 and v-ray 3.10.2 running correctly with the v-ray spawner. We submit from Max 2014 and it renders correctly.

However I have hit on a bit of a problem when trying to render to a workstation which is set up the same way. It accepts the render, and seems to start loading the scene, but before it starts to render it drops out, the max dummy suddenly quits and nothing renders. The spawner automatically restarts and the process repeats until the render is complete on the master machine.

I have checked the Max.log, but helpfully the error message is "An unexpected exception has occurred in the network renderer..."

Any suggestions?

Cheers,

Bill

[Morbid Angel]

have you started backburner on that system before?

[LQ2]

Hi Dmitry,

Thanks for getting back to me. I have not started backburner on that machine before, and now you mention it I have heard of that before. What exactly do you need to do? I have never had to do that before on any of the render nodes, so I'm a bit surprised that it makes a difference.

Should I start the manager, server, or monitor on the machine?

Cheers,

Bill

[Morbid Angel]

yeah i usually try running bb server with manager and complete 1 task using that.

[LQ2]

I have now tried the following:

I started the Backburner manager on one machine. On that same machine I set up the monitor and the server, and sent a render to it. There were issues and it failed. I have fixed those issues and completed a successful render. On another machine which has worked fine in the past I have started the backburner server and sent a successful render. BUT, I still cannot get either of the machines to render using v-ray distributed rendering. I cannot find anywhere anything that is wrong with either of them. The first machine mentioned above is a workstation, on which I can render, and distribute from, but not successfully distribute to. On all the machines I have tried I have tried with the firewall off and it makes no difference. What is annoying is that the second machine mentioned above is a previously perfectly functioning render node which has suddenly decided not to distribute to!

My only avenue now is that somehow there is a plugin missing or something like that. I am at a loss as to what the problem is now.

Any suggestions now?

Cheers,

Bill

[Morbid Angel]

Just curious you do have enough render licenses for vray? dr requires extra license.

[LQ2]

We have two license servers, one has 2 Interface licenses and 12 render licenses, the other has 2 interface licenses and 2 render licenses. All our machines are duel processor, and I believe we need one license per processor (hyper-threading doesn't count?). We have 7 render nodes, and 4 machines, which I know is much more that 14 render licenses that we have, but the problem exists when we only render to 1 node from the master, with no other rendering going on. Unless there is some sort of checking out system... while saying that I had another look at the "License server information" page on the license server, and noticed that there are "active sessions" with the render nodes! Could this be the problem? Does it check out a license as soon as the DR spawner is loaded?

[LQ2]

Solved it!!!

GOT IT!!!!!

THIS IS THE SOLUTION:

My Max 2015 install was service pack 3 and the v-ray version number was 3.10.02. On the machines that work, the Max service pack number, SP2 or SP3, correspond to the v-ray version number 3.10.02 and 3.10.03 respectively. If there is a disparity, SP3 with 3.10.02 the distributed render fails. Once I update the v-ray version to 3.10.03 there is no problem.

in short (as per Svetlozar's response below):

Max 2015 SP3 requires V-ray 3.10.03 to work as it fixed a bug with older v-ray versions.

Thanks for your help/support while trying to troubleshoot this problem. It gave me the ideas necessary to find the problem and the solution.

Cheers,

Bill

[Svetlozar Draganov]

There was a bug with V-Ray 3.10.02 and bellow with 3DSmax 2015 SP3, this issue has been fixed in V-Ray 3.10.03 that's why everything works after the update.
It is not necessary 3DSmax and V-Ray service pack to match.

[Morbid Angel]

There was a bug with V-Ray 3.10.02 and bellow with 3DSmax 2015 SP3, this issue has been fixed in V-Ray 3.10.03 that's why everything works after the update.
It is not necessary 3DSmax and V-Ray service pack to match.

However you generally want to have the exact same build on all workstations and render nodes respectively.

Good luck!