Vray NEXT - DR and LOCAL buckets output inconsistency only on particular machine

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Hello guy,

i dont even know how to name this problem properly

it seems i have found a bug in the way NEXT computes DR.
We have 14 computers in our office and ONE computer (unfortunatelly my workstation) is computing most of the scenes in the office with LIGHTER BUCKETS.

Another observation is that further away from the light the buckets are, the more difference in contrast there is.


It doesnt matter if i render the scene from the local computer with the benefit of using DR or if i send it to farm and use my computer as a spawner.

I am using Vray sun in the scene and grey material so unlinked textures or wrong HDRIs are out of equation completely


All versions of all the softwares are the same.

Any ideas - never bumped into this before.

Its even more evident on textured scene.


I have no idea whether it might have something to do with my previous problem of DR crashing when using localhost computer, but the fact this problem is leading only to my machine is strange.

The scene also saves long time although it only has 8MB and the transforming vertices takes long time too when there is not much to render really.

Attached is the render and the 3D scene.

render test stripped.zip




Would be great if this could be possibly worked out soon, otherwise, after all the troubles we had with NEXT so far, we will have to go back to 3.6 :-/
My workstation scores around 4K in Cinebench so you can imagine the impact it has on completing jobs in the office.


Thanks a lot!

Best Regards
Martin

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

OK, so i remembered the good old times before vray 3.0 came and merged this scene to a new one.

It saves quicker.
It doesnt have the transforming vertices thing.
And it doesnt have the problems with the buckets.

But it also looks a little different.

Could it be something from vray 3.6 getting stuck in that scene causing problems on my workstation only?
Or is this MAX issue?


Mind you that we used autoexposure on this scene in NEXT.

Well at least i know next time this happens i will do the merge the 1st thing.
But lets hope were not going to have to do this with most of our scenes....afterall we tend to reuse quite a lot from the stuff we use during the year.

M

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

so we merged the full scene into a new file and its still doing the different buckets

but now MORE nodes do the lighter buckets :-/

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

OK!!!! So we solved this and i think something needs to be done about this, either in the code or at least by printed warning.

The AUTOEXPOSURE doesnt get transfered over DR.

so to avoid this you have either not use it in DR or you have to transfer the autoexposure to the camera prior to rendering.


In my opinion this shoudl be hardcoded so that the autoexposure gets transfered to the DR nodes before they pick up the job.

or at least for now, print a warning for the user that when the autoexposure and DR is active, the settgins must be transfered.


This again took away half of my day :-/////

[vlado]

The autoexposure should be transferred just fine to the nodes. If it doesn't work, then it's a bug that needs to be fixed. Does this happen on every scene or just this particular one? In any case we'll check the scene that you posted.

Best regards,
Vlado

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Hi Vlado,

it seems to be happening mostly on scenes which are created in 3.6 and then finished in NEXT.

in any case, in every scene we tested today, transfering the exposure to cameras fixes this.

The scene i provided should be enough to replicate it hopefully, if not, i will wrap up a different version of it for your inspection.

I am starting a new scene in few days so i will let you know if it happens to do this on a newly built scene OK?

Thanks!

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

OK Vlado so here is the result of what we found:

1.
In DR we have to work without autoexposure otherwise we get the differently light buckets
2.
We installed the latest stable nightly and it appears to be somewhat less dramatic in terms of count of affected scenes
3.
Sometimes the inconsistnt buckets appear, we stop the render, restart the job and it renders fine. This is very random problem - seems to be.
4.
happens even on scenes built entirely in NEXT
5.
We even got pure black buckets as if some nodes lost license - there seems to be some bug in online licensing - we seem to get dropped nodes very often.
Would it be possible to request offline usage for all our workstations and render nodes? I sometimes have to restart the computer to pick up the license again.
We had to install LS on all the workstations to solve this. When LS was installed on one machine only, the licensing got these blackouts very often.
This happens even when we are online all the time.
6.
Even when AE is off we randomply get these buckets on random nodes (everything linked)