Render texture mask flickering off and on when rendered on the farm

[re:FORM]

We are rendering on max 2016, vray 3, deadline 7.1, and I'm having an odd problem where some rendernodes are failing to pick up the render mask texture-map causing it to flicker on and off between frames.

The texture is a network located 32-bit exr loaded by a vrayhdri texturemap with "3ds max standard" mapping, environment - screen, piped in to a color correction node to take the red channel and copy it in to the green and blue channels, and then piped in to an output map to invert.

Has there been any other reports of this problem? I don't think there is anything special about the nodes that are failing, so I'm not sure what the problem might be.
There is not error in the logs either; but the nodes that fail have less instances of the "Sampling render mask texture " logs.

Thanks
p.

[tashko.zashev]

Hi Patrick,

There is definitely a bug in this setup. I managed to reproduce the problem on one machine when save, restart Max, load and render the scene again. The render mask features takes only the last map node according to my tests and the map in the HDRI node is ignored until its being refreshed, reloaded ....

As a workaround I could suggest to bake the final map to file and use only one node in the render mask texture slot until we have a fix.


Please let me now if this resolves the problem in your environment as well.

Thank you for detailed explanation of the issue.

[re:FORM]

Thanks for confirming that Tashko, and finding the workaround. Glad to hear it's just because I was using a shading network rather than a simple loader.
Thanks again.
p.

[tashko.zashev]

Our developers found the problem and will fix it.