Final couple of buckets in solution taking forever

[tricky]

We have a pretty typical outdoor scene. A couple of simple buildings, cars, trees, bushes etc.

We are doing a render and find that the solution sometimes hangs for a crazy amount of time on the last few buckets. We are using a farm of about 10 machines plus the local workstation. Two small buckets are the local machine, and about 3 are from one of our farm machines.

It took about 10 minutes to do 99.9% of the solution (LC + IRmap) and we have been waiting about a further 20+ minutes for these last solution buckets to drop.

Any solution to this kind of thing? It is always when we are up against a deadline!

[ChaosGroup]

Could you specify which V-Ray and 3ds max version do you use? Also does the issue persist during rendering or light maps calculations? Have you tried using only Irradiance map or BF?
Furthermore does the issue persist if you render locally on one machine? Have you tried decreasing the bucket size and does the issue persist on this scene only? Moreover what sort of additional plugins do you use for the trees and bushes?

[tricky]

We may have fixed the problem today on this particular project. It seemed to relate to ForestPro objects that had nothing in them. Either that or a couple of coplanar objects.

Is there any option in future versions where we could have a button to cancel calculating the solution and just render with what we have? There would be a few dodgy-looking buckets at render time, but we could sort that out with a bit of Photoshop later. Its a pain when things hang for so long and prevent getting onto the render.

[Zdravko.Keremidchiev]

There was such an issue with ForestPro objects logged in our system, which is already fixed. The fix will be available with the next release.
Also please note that if you are saving to .vrimg file format every bucket is saved in the file after it is finished so when the renderer hangs you can still use the image or whatever part of it is done.